Aaron James Young - Interesting articles I read recentlyAaron James Young - Interesting articles I read recentlyhttps://ajy.co/2020-06-07T05:08:47+00:00
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https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/if-the-president-tells-you-to-shoot-looters-you-have-a-duty-to-disobey/If the President Tells You to Shoot Looters, You Have a Duty to Disobey2020-05-29T14:27:00.000-07:00UPDATE: Fifteen hours after the tweet cited in this article, President Trump tweeted:
Looting leads to shooting, and that’s why a man was shot and killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday night – or look at what just happened in Louisville with 7 people shot. I don’t want this to happen, and that’s what the expression put out last night means. It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement. It’s very simple, nobody should have any problem with this other than the haters, and those looking to cause trouble on social media. Honor the memory of George Floyd!
The president appears to now be claiming that he was not saying the law enforcement or National Guardsmen would be doing the “shooting,” but rather that it was being done by civilians. He seems to be, in the first instance, referencing the apparent killing of a looter by a store owner. In the second instance he references, seven people were shot by unknown assailants. If we put that claim (“It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement.”) into the original tweet we have:
“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, [people get shot].”
Even with the clarification it is difficult to see how he could have been referring to anyone other than the “military” doing the shooting. The key sentence is, “Any difficulty and we [the military] will assume control but, when the looting starts, [people get shot].” Perhaps if he had said “because” instead of “but” the context might have referred to someone other than the military.
Did I misunderstand his meaning? Possibly, though when writing this article I did not see anyone—neither those who oppose the president nor those who support him—who did not assume he was referring to the “military” doing the “shooting.” Trump also tweeted six more times before he posted his clarifying tweets.
I believe it was reasonable, if not obvious, to assume the president was referring to the National Guard. That reading would be in keeping with prior statements he has made. For example, while a candidate, President Trump said he would order the U.S. military to kill innocent family members of terrorists. When it was pointed out to him that the military would be obliged to disobey because it was a war crime, he responded, “If I say do it, they’re gonna do it. That’s what leadership is all about.”
However, the president does seem to distance himself from this widespread interpretation of the original tweet. I think we should now give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he won’t order deadly force against looters—and we should also assume that the U.S. military would not obey such an order if it were given.
Should we respond to the illegal use of violence with the use of illegal violence?
For Christians, the answer to that question should be obvious. But the responses to the recent riots and protests in Minneapolis and St. Paul reveal that we are more conflicted about the answer than we should be.
On one side are Christians who legitimize the illegal use of violence (the looting and rioting) as a valid response to the use of illegal violence in the apparent murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. On the other side are those who believe that to quell the looting and destruction of property could necessitate the use of deadly force.
On this latter side stands the president of the United States. This morning, President Trump tweeted:
“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
In his tweet he referred to the “Military,” meaning the National Guard, which has already been deployed to Minneapolis and St. Paul. The National Guard is normally under the control of individual states and the state governor, who acts as commander in chief. But the president has the authority bring the National Guard under federal control for certain circumstances, including a “rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” National Guardsmen also swear an oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution of the United States and agree to obey the orders of the president of the United States “according to law, regulations, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, so help me God.”
Yet while Trump understands that he has the authority to “assume control” of the National Guard, he doesn’t appear to understand that he has no authority to order the military to shoot looters. Unfortunately, some Christians in America also fail to understand that fact—which could lead to unlawful and unbiblical use of violence.
Sphere Sovereignty and Submission to Authority
As Christians we are commanded by God through the apostle Paul to “be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established” (Rom. 13:1). The apostle Peter also tells us, “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right” (1 Pet. 2:13-14).
Obeying these commands is non-negotiable; understanding how they apply, though, is not always obvious. For example, we might ask who or what constitutes the governing or human authority to which we must submit.
Abraham Kuyper shed helpful light on this question in his concept of sphere sovereignty. Sphere sovereignty is the biblical idea that God has created human society to be formed into distinct spheres (such as family, church, school, state, business, and so on), each of which is sovereign in relation to the others, but subject directly to God under the divine laws particular to each sphere. Each sphere also has distinctive kinds of authority, limited to a particular sphere.*
We recognize that every individual and institution has a specific sphere of influence and sovereignty that is delegated by God. A teacher, for example, has both the authority over her classroom and also the responsibility to ensure that her pupils receive an education. Both authority and responsibility as a teacher, however, are limited to the school and cannot legitimately be extended outside that particular sphere. A public-school teacher, for instance, lacks the authority to come to your church and determine how Sunday school students will be educated.
Similarly, the president of the United States has authority and responsibility delegated by God (Prov. 8:15-16) and circumscribed by the U.S Constitution and other laws. This is an important point, because the president’s authority—delegated by both God and man—is limited to those powers authorized by the Constitution. This is essential context for understanding how we interpret the command to submit to authorities.
For much of human history, the dominant legal principle was rex lex—“the king is law.” In the 1600s, though, that view was reversed, mostly by Christian thinkers like Samuel Rutherford, who claimed lex rex—“the law is king.” Since then most Western governments have adopted the principle that the rule of law, rather than the arbitrary diktats of government officials, should govern a nation.
This understanding of the rule of law shows how we answer such questions as who constitutes a governing authority in the United States. How do we know who is a governing authority? We look to the law to tell us who has been legally appointed or elected as an authority. A person cannot merely claim to be a city mayor, a state governor, or a U.S. president and expect Christians to obey their presumed authority. We have to know they received their legitimate authority by a process that conformed to the rule of law. In America, lex rex.
Why Shooting Looters Is Illegal
According to the rule of law, President Trump is the duly elected president of the United States. In his role as president, he has authority to take command of the National Guard units in Minnesota. But he has no authority to order that all looters be shot.
The Army doctrine on defense support of civil authorities makes it clear that, “Soldiers may use lethal force if they or another person are in imminent risk of death or serious injury.” It also adds, “The decisions and actions of commanders and Soldiers must be ethically legal and morally right, in adherence to the established RUF and the Army Ethic.”
Unlike the president, many of those serving in the military already know, “Deadly force is not authorized to disperse a crowd, stop looting, enforce a curfew, or protect non-designated property.” But some Guardsman may genuinely believe Trump’s tweet is a valid order. In the military, a commanding officer’s statement of “I wish” or “I desire” means “I order you to do” whatever is the wish or desire. A public statement by the commander in chief to shoot looters may also be misconstrued as legally authorized order.
However, such an order, whether given directly or indirectly, would be illegal, since it violates the U.S. Constitution. Legal scholar Orin Kerr has noted that following the policy of “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” violates the Fourth Amendment. He cites the Supreme Court precedent in Tennessee v. Garner (1985), which clarifies that the use of deadly force against a suspect is only valid when there is a “significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the [police] officer or others.” As the Court said in their ruling:
The use of deadly force to prevent the escape of all felony suspects, whatever the circumstances, is constitutionally unreasonable. It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape. Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so. It is no doubt unfortunate when a suspect who is in sight escapes, but the fact that the police arrive a little late or are a little slower afoot does not always justify killing the suspect. A police officer may not seize an unarmed, nondangerous suspect by shooting him dead. The Tennessee statute is unconstitutional insofar as it authorizes the use of deadly force against such fleeing suspects.
By implying he would have the National Guard shoot looters, President Trump risks violating the Fourth Amendment.* “Trump swore to protect and defend the Constitution,” Conor Friedersdorf says. “He just violated that oath. When he wrote ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts,’ he implicitly urged law enforcement to adopt an approach that would transgress against the Constitution, violate Fourth Amendment rights, and cause unlawful deaths.”
In his tweet, President Trump implied he would use his legitimate and legal authority to order an illegal and illegitimate action. Any Christian in either law enforcement or the U.S. military should have no qualms about disobeying such an order. Indeed, we would have a moral duty to disobey such as an illegal order, for when the commands of a governing authority conflict with God’s commands, believers must follow the Lord (Acts 5:29).
* I’m unsure where this specific wording and definition of sphere sovereignty originated, but it was told to me in 2004 by my friend Gideon Strauss.
** Couldn’t President Trump be excused for not being aware of the law? No, he cannot. A common legal principle is ignorantia juris non excusat (Latin for “ignorance of the law excuses not”). This principle holds that a person who is unaware of a law may not escape liability for violating that law merely because one was unaware of its content. This long-held concept originated in the Bible: “If anyone sins and does what is forbidden in any of the LORD’s commands, even though they do not know it, they are guilty and will be held responsible” (Lev. 5:17).
Unlike the average citizen, President Trump swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” He also has literally thousands of lawyers at his disposal who could have told him his statement was not only illegal but also a violation as both his role as commander in chief and as the chief law enforcement authority in the United States.

UPDATE: Fifteen hours after the tweet cited in this article, President Trump tweeted:

Looting leads to shooting, and that’s why a man was shot and killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday night – or look at what just happened in Louisville with 7 people shot. I don’t want this to happen, and that’s what the expression put out last night means. It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement. It’s very simple, nobody should have any problem with this other than the haters, and those looking to cause trouble on social media. Honor the memory of George Floyd!

The president appears to now be claiming that he was not saying the law enforcement or National Guardsmen would be doing the “shooting,” but rather that it was being done by civilians. He seems to be, in the first instance, referencing the apparent killing of a looter by a store owner. In the second instance he references, seven people were shot by unknown assailants. If we put that claim (“It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement.”) into the original tweet we have:

“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, [people get shot].”

Even with the clarification it is difficult to see how he could have been referring to anyone other than the “military” doing the shooting. The key sentence is, “Any difficulty and we [the military] will assume control but, when the looting starts, [people get shot].” Perhaps if he had said “because” instead of “but” the context might have referred to someone other than the military.

Did I misunderstand his meaning? Possibly, though when writing this article I did not see anyone—neither those who oppose the president nor those who support him—who did not assume he was referring to the “military” doing the “shooting.” Trump also tweeted six more times before he posted his clarifying tweets.

I believe it was reasonable, if not obvious, to assume the president was referring to the National Guard. That reading would be in keeping with prior statements he has made. For example, while a candidate, President Trump said he would order the U.S. military to kill innocent family members of terrorists. When it was pointed out to him that the military would be obliged to disobey because it was a war crime, he responded, “If I say do it, they’re gonna do it. That’s what leadership is all about.”

However, the president does seem to distance himself from this widespread interpretation of the original tweet. I think we should now give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he won’t order deadly force against looters—and we should also assume that the U.S. military would not obey such an order if it were given.

Should we respond to the illegal use of violence with the use of illegal violence?
For Christians, the answer to that question should be obvious. But the responses to the recent riots and protests in Minneapolis and St. Paul reveal that we are more conflicted about the answer than we should be.

On one side are Christians who legitimize the illegal use of violence (the looting and rioting) as a valid response to the use of illegal violence in the apparent murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. On the other side are those who believe that to quell the looting and destruction of property could necessitate the use of deadly force.

“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

In his tweet he referred to the “Military,” meaning the National Guard, which has already been deployed to Minneapolis and St. Paul. The National Guard is normally under the control of individual states and the state governor, who acts as commander in chief. But the president has the authority bring the National Guard under federal control for certain circumstances, including a “rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” National Guardsmen also swear an oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution of the United States and agree to obey the orders of the president of the United States “according to law, regulations, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, so help me God.”

Yet while Trump understands that he has the authority to “assume control” of the National Guard, he doesn’t appear to understand that he has no authority to order the military to shoot looters. Unfortunately, some Christians in America also fail to understand that fact—which could lead to unlawful and unbiblical use of violence.

Sphere Sovereignty and Submission to Authority

As Christians we are commanded by God through the apostle Paul to “be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established” (Rom. 13:1). The apostle Peter also tells us, “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right” (1 Pet. 2:13-14).

Obeying these commands is non-negotiable; understanding how they apply, though, is not always obvious. For example, we might ask who or what constitutes the governing or human authority to which we must submit.

Abraham Kuyper shed helpful light on this question in his concept of sphere sovereignty. Sphere sovereignty is the biblical idea that God has created human society to be formed into distinct spheres (such as family, church, school, state, business, and so on), each of which is sovereign in relation to the others, but subject directly to God under the divine laws particular to each sphere. Each sphere also has distinctive kinds of authority, limited to a particular sphere.*

We recognize that every individual and institution has a specific sphere of influence and sovereignty that is delegated by God. A teacher, for example, has both the authority over her classroom and also the responsibility to ensure that her pupils receive an education. Both authority and responsibility as a teacher, however, are limited to the school and cannot legitimately be extended outside that particular sphere. A public-school teacher, for instance, lacks the authority to come to your church and determine how Sunday school students will be educated.

Similarly, the president of the United States has authority and responsibility delegated by God (Prov. 8:15-16) and circumscribed by the U.S Constitution and other laws. This is an important point, because the president’s authority—delegated by both God and man—is limited to those powers authorized by the Constitution. This is essential context for understanding how we interpret the command to submit to authorities.

For much of human history, the dominant legal principle was rex lex—“the king is law.” In the 1600s, though, that view was reversed, mostly by Christian thinkers like Samuel Rutherford, who claimed lex rex—“the law is king.” Since then most Western governments have adopted the principle that the rule of law, rather than the arbitrary diktats of government officials, should govern a nation.

This understanding of the rule of law shows how we answer such questions as who constitutes a governing authority in the United States. How do we know who is a governing authority? We look to the law to tell us who has been legally appointed or elected as an authority. A person cannot merely claim to be a city mayor, a state governor, or a U.S. president and expect Christians to obey their presumed authority. We have to know they received their legitimate authority by a process that conformed to the rule of law. In America, lex rex.

Why Shooting Looters Is Illegal

According to the rule of law, President Trump is the duly elected president of the United States. In his role as president, he has authority to take command of the National Guard units in Minnesota. But he has no authority to order that all looters be shot.

The Army doctrine on defense support of civil authorities makes it clear that, “Soldiers may use lethal force if they or another person are in imminent risk of death or serious injury.” It also adds, “The decisions and actions of commanders and Soldiers must be ethically legal and morally right, in adherence to the established RUF and the Army Ethic.”

Unlike the president, many of those serving in the military already know, “Deadly force is not authorized to disperse a crowd, stop looting, enforce a curfew, or protect non-designated property.” But some Guardsman may genuinely believe Trump’s tweet is a valid order. In the military, a commanding officer’s statement of “I wish” or “I desire” means “I order you to do” whatever is the wish or desire. A public statement by the commander in chief to shoot looters may also be misconstrued as legally authorized order.

However, such an order, whether given directly or indirectly, would be illegal, since it violates the U.S. Constitution. Legal scholar Orin Kerr has noted that following the policy of “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” violates the Fourth Amendment. He cites the Supreme Court precedent in Tennessee v. Garner (1985), which clarifies that the use of deadly force against a suspect is only valid when there is a “significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the [police] officer or others.” As the Court said in their ruling:

The use of deadly force to prevent the escape of all felony suspects, whatever the circumstances, is constitutionally unreasonable. It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape. Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so. It is no doubt unfortunate when a suspect who is in sight escapes, but the fact that the police arrive a little late or are a little slower afoot does not always justify killing the suspect. A police officer may not seize an unarmed, nondangerous suspect by shooting him dead. The Tennessee statute is unconstitutional insofar as it authorizes the use of deadly force against such fleeing suspects.

By implying he would have the National Guard shoot looters, President Trump risks violating the Fourth Amendment.* “Trump swore to protect and defend the Constitution,” Conor Friedersdorf says. “He just violated that oath. When he wrote ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts,’ he implicitly urged law enforcement to adopt an approach that would transgress against the Constitution, violate Fourth Amendment rights, and cause unlawful deaths.”

In his tweet, President Trump implied he would use his legitimate and legal authority to order an illegal and illegitimate action. Any Christian in either law enforcement or the U.S. military should have no qualms about disobeying such an order. Indeed, we would have a moral duty to disobey such as an illegal order, for when the commands of a governing authority conflict with God’s commands, believers must follow the Lord (Acts 5:29).

* I’m unsure where this specific wording and definition of sphere sovereignty originated, but it was told to me in 2004 by my friend Gideon Strauss.

** Couldn’t President Trump be excused for not being aware of the law? No, he cannot. A common legal principle is ignorantia juris non excusat (Latin for “ignorance of the law excuses not”). This principle holds that a person who is unaware of a law may not escape liability for violating that law merely because one was unaware of its content. This long-held concept originated in the Bible: “If anyone sins and does what is forbidden in any of the LORD’s commands, even though they do not know it, they are guilty and will be held responsible” (Lev. 5:17).

Unlike the average citizen, President Trump swore an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” He also has literally thousands of lawyers at his disposal who could have told him his statement was not only illegal but also a violation as both his role as commander in chief and as the chief law enforcement authority in the United States.

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Joe Carterhttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttps://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/29/864917847/new-zealand-now-has-just-1-active-covid-19-case?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=newsNew Zealand Now Has Just 1 Active COVID-19 Case2020-05-29T07:48:00.000-07:00Enlarge this image
New Zealand is now allowing gatherings of up to 100 people, and the country says it has just one active COVID-19 case. Much of the credit for the country's success has gone to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, seen here walking through the coastal city of Napier on Friday.
Kerry Marshall/Getty Images
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Kerry Marshall/Getty Images
New Zealand is now allowing gatherings of up to 100 people, and the country says it has just one active COVID-19 case. Much of the credit for the country's success has gone to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, seen here walking through the coastal city of Napier on Friday.
Kerry Marshall/Getty Images
New Zealand is now down to only one active COVID-19 case, reaching a new level of success in its fight against the coronavirus. The last time a new case was reported in the country was more than a week ago; no one is currently hospitalized with the disease. "For the seventh day in a row, there are no new cases of COVID-19 to report in New Zealand," the Ministry of Health said on Friday. The news came on the same day that the country further eased its restrictions on the public. It will now permit gatherings of up to 100 people – clearing the way for weddings, parties, funerals and other large events. Restaurants can also host up to 100 people, as long as safety protocols are followed. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has repeatedly urged caution even as she has celebrated a string of successes in combating COVID-19. When Ardern announced that the country had eliminated community transmission last month, she said, "We have won that battle" – and she added, "But we must remain vigilant if we are to keep it that way."
Ardern is credited with taking decisive and early action to minimize the coronavirus's impact on her country. "In mid-March, as cases were exploding in Italy and Spain, Ardern ordered anyone entering New Zealand into quarantine," NPR's Jason Beaubien reports. "At that point, the country had confirmed just six cases. A few days later, on March 19, Ardern shut down travel to the country, essentially banning all foreigners from entering the island nation of 4.8 million." The prime minister also explained the "unprecedented" threat posed by the coronavirus and the country's plan to tackle it, laying out a four-stage lockdown system that closed schools, businesses and travel. That system worked well, allowing New Zealand to permit businesses and schools to reopen earlier this month. In a bid to help the country's economy by bolstering domestic tourism, Ardern has also urged businesses to consider allowing employees to work a four-day week. Overall, New Zealand has reported 1,154 confirmed cases of the disease, along with 350 probable cases. With seven more people recovering from the disease late this week, the number of recovered cases now stands at 1,481, the ministry says. Worldwide, the four worst-hit countries are the U.S., with more than 1.7 million confirmed cases, followed by Brazil, Russia and the United Kingdom.

New Zealand is now allowing gatherings of up to 100 people, and the country says it has just one active COVID-19 case. Much of the credit for the country's success has gone to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, seen here walking through the coastal city of Napier on Friday.
Kerry Marshall/Getty Images
hide caption

toggle caption

Kerry Marshall/Getty Images

New Zealand is now allowing gatherings of up to 100 people, and the country says it has just one active COVID-19 case. Much of the credit for the country's success has gone to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, seen here walking through the coastal city of Napier on Friday.

Kerry Marshall/Getty Images

New Zealand is now down to only one active COVID-19 case, reaching a new level of success in its fight against the coronavirus. The last time a new case was reported in the country was more than a week ago; no one is currently hospitalized with the disease.

"For the seventh day in a row, there are no new cases of COVID-19 to report in New Zealand," the Ministry of Health said on Friday.

The news came on the same day that the country further eased its restrictions on the public. It will now permit gatherings of up to 100 people – clearing the way for weddings, parties, funerals and other large events. Restaurants can also host up to 100 people, as long as safety protocols are followed.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has repeatedly urged caution even as she has celebrated a string of successes in combating COVID-19.

When Ardern announced that the country had eliminated community transmission last month, she said, "We have won that battle" – and she added, "But we must remain vigilant if we are to keep it that way."

Ardern is credited with taking decisive and early action to minimize the coronavirus's impact on her country.

"In mid-March, as cases were exploding in Italy and Spain, Ardern ordered anyone entering New Zealand into quarantine," NPR's Jason Beaubien reports. "At that point, the country had confirmed just six cases. A few days later, on March 19, Ardern shut down travel to the country, essentially banning all foreigners from entering the island nation of 4.8 million."

The prime minister also explained the "unprecedented" threat posed by the coronavirus and the country's plan to tackle it, laying out a four-stage lockdown system that closed schools, businesses and travel.

In a bid to help the country's economy by bolstering domestic tourism, Ardern has also urged businesses to consider allowing employees to work a four-day week.

Overall, New Zealand has reported 1,154 confirmed cases of the disease, along with 350 probable cases.

With seven more people recovering from the disease late this week, the number of recovered cases now stands at 1,481, the ministry says.

Worldwide, the four worst-hit countries are the U.S., with more than 1.7 million confirmed cases, followed by Brazil, Russia and the United Kingdom.

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Bill Chappellhttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttps://www.axios.com/donald-trump-twitter-fight-warnings-3a75d22c-074f-4a46-b4a6-485e21b44968.htmlTrump's big, empty beef with Twitter2020-05-29T07:31:00.000-07:00President Trump finally acted on his now year-old threat to take action against social media platforms for alleged bias against conservatives. But so far, according to experts in both government and the industry, the threat looks mostly empty.Driving the news: Trump escalated his war on Twitter Friday morning, tweeting repeatedly that the company needs to be regulated after it overnight added a warning label to a tweet of his calling for the military to start shooting looters, which violated Twitter’s rules against glorifying violence."Section 230 should be revoked by Congress. Until then, it will be regulated!" Trump said, referring to the "Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship" he signed Thursday.Trump's problem, as laid out by Axios' Jonathan Swan: He knows how essential Twitter (along with Facebook) is to his political success. He's mad at Twitter for fact-checking and placing a warning label on some of his messages. And he's frustrated that he can't bring Twitter to heel by executive fiat.The order is what Trump's team, with Attorney General Bill Barr on point, came up with to placate the president after his fury over Twitter's fact check on a false claim he tweeted about mail-in ballots in California.The order is a grab-bag of regulatory half-measures and legal Hail Mary passes that the White House weighed and then shelved last summer, only to dust them off again.Less a practical policy framework than a battle cry intended to stir Trump's legions of "keyboard warriors," it isn't likely to change the law, but could still heat up the fight.What the order is not:It's not a credible legal strategy for overturning the protection from liability that online service providers won almost 25 years ago, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.Trump wishes he could do this, but only Congress can. And even though there are critics of social media among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, it's highly unlikely there will be consensus on whether and how to amend Section 230, and even unlikelier it'll be repealed altogether, as Trump now wants.It's not a well-crafted regulatory effort to bring the platforms under the sway of the FCC and the FTC.Experts and some agency insiders are skeptical that the FCC will embrace the order's request that it find ways to limit Section 230's sway. (The FCC isn't even mentioned in Section 230.)The order also asks the FTC to use its power to police deceptive practices against social media platforms that apply their content moderation rules inconsistently or with alleged bias. But that's not a realm the FTC has ever policed.It's not much of a business threat to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the rest.The order tells the Office of Management and Budget to review government spending on advertising on these platforms.No company likes to lose revenue, but even pulling every federal dollar from social media firms would hardly put a dent in their bottom lines.What the order is:It's an effort to cow Twitter, along with other platforms, from going further down the fact-checking road.It's also a way for the White House to change the subject, for a news cycle or two at least, from a grim pandemic with a staggering death toll.Most important, it's a way of firing up Trump's online troops, for whom perceived platform bias has been a longstanding grievance.What's next: The executive order calls for a half-dozen different reviews, requests and working groups — including one for the states, convened by Barr, to get creative about cracking down on "unfair and deceptive acts and practices" by online platforms.If the order makes any policy headway, Trump can claim victory.If, as is more likely, it hits roadblocks in the agencies and the courts, Trump can blame "the swamp" and "the Deep State" and reap fresh bushels of partisan outrage.
President Trump finally acted on his now year-old threat to take action against social media platforms for alleged bias against conservatives. But so far, according to experts in both government and the industry, the threat looks mostly empty.

Driving the news: Trump escalated his war on Twitter Friday morning, tweeting repeatedly that the company needs to be regulated after it overnight added a warning label to a tweet of his calling for the military to start shooting looters, which violated Twitter’s rules against glorifying violence.

Trump's problem, as laid out by Axios' Jonathan Swan: He knows how essential Twitter (along with Facebook) is to his political success. He's mad at Twitter for fact-checking and placing a warning label on some of his messages. And he's frustrated that he can't bring Twitter to heel by executive fiat.

The order is what Trump's team, with Attorney General Bill Barr on point, came up with to placate the president after his fury over Twitter's fact check on a false claim he tweeted about mail-in ballots in California.

The order is a grab-bagof regulatory half-measures and legal Hail Mary passes that the White House weighed and then shelved last summer, only to dust them off again.

Less a practical policy framework than a battle cry intended to stir Trump's legions of "keyboard warriors," it isn't likely to change the law, but could still heat up the fight.

What the order is not:

It's not a credible legal strategy for overturning the protection from liability that online service providers won almost 25 years ago, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Trump wishes he could do this, but only Congress can. And even though there are critics of social media among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, it's highly unlikely there will be consensus on whether and how to amend Section 230, and even unlikelier it'll be repealed altogether, as Trump now wants.

It's not a well-crafted regulatory effort to bring the platforms under the sway of the FCC and the FTC.

Experts and some agency insiders are skeptical that the FCC will embrace the order's request that it find ways to limit Section 230's sway. (The FCC isn't even mentioned in Section 230.)

The order also asks the FTC to use its power to police deceptive practices against social media platforms that apply their content moderation rules inconsistently or with alleged bias. But that's not a realm the FTC has ever policed.

It's not much of a business threat to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the rest.

The order tells the Office of Management and Budget to review government spending on advertising on these platforms.

No company likes to lose revenue, but even pulling every federal dollar from social media firms would hardly put a dent in their bottom lines.

What the order is:

It's an effort to cow Twitter, along with other platforms, from going further down the fact-checking road.

It's also a way for the White House to change the subject, for a news cycle or two at least, from a grim pandemic with a staggering death toll.

Most important, it's a way of firing up Trump's online troops, for whom perceived platform bias has been a longstanding grievance.

What's next: The executive order calls for a half-dozen different reviews, requests and working groups — including one for the states, convened by Barr, to get creative about cracking down on "unfair and deceptive acts and practices" by online platforms.

If the order makes any policy headway, Trump can claim victory.

If, as is more likely, it hits roadblocks in the agencies and the courts, Trump can blame "the swamp" and "the Deep State" and reap fresh bushels of partisan outrage.

]]>
Scott Rosenberghttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/28/trump-retweets-video-saying-only-good-democrat-is-dead-democrat/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=wp_politicsTrump retweets a video saying ‘the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat’2020-05-28T07:51:00.000-07:00If there was ever a tweet tailor-made for promotion by President Trump, it might be this one: A video by an account called “Cowboys for Trump” in which the speaker begins by saying, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” The speaker quickly qualifies that he’s not speaking literally.
At precisely midnight, the president felt this was the kind of message that people needed to see. “Thank you Cowboys. See you in New Mexico!” he said in a retweet.
Thank you Cowboys. See you in New Mexico! https://t.co/aCRJeskUA8— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2020
What lay ahead was entirely predictable. People are rightly pointing out that a president just promoted the idea of dead Democrats. Trump will have the kind of plausible deniability he craves — the guy even said he wasn’t being literal! — and the world will keep turning.
AD
But the speaker has also made clear he wasn’t being entirely figurative. And Trump’s history with this particular kind of thing makes clear he knows exactly what he’s injecting into the national dialogue.
AD
The video is actually more than a week old, having caused a stir back then. The speaker, an Otero County, N.M., commissioner named Couy Griffin, has already been disavowed by the New Mexico Republican Party, even if he was just speaking figuratively.
The Republican Party of New Mexico wants to state for the record that any statements, whether in jest or serious about harming another individual are just plain wrong.— New Mexico GOP (@NewMexicoGOP) May 20, 2020
“The Republican Party of New Mexico wants to state for the record that any statements, whether in jest or serious about harming another individual are just plain wrong,” the party said in a tweet on May 20. The Young Republicans of New Mexico have also called for him to apologize.
AD
Griffin initially declined to back down and claimed persecution, though he eventually said he “could’ve chosen a different verbiage, you know. I guess I need to be more careful when I choose the words that I speak.”
But his other comments indicated he’s not entirely discounting the idea of violence or dead Democrats.
AD
In the same remarks, Griffin said that a “Plan B” after “Plan A” of winning elections would be some kind of uprising. “If we have to get shoulder-to-shoulder and create posses and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our great sheriffs, we’ll fight you at the county lines, but we’re not letting you have our guns,” he said.
He was later asked by the Daily Beast whether protesters against coronavirus-related restrictions might resort to violence, and responded, “I’ll tell you what, partner, as far as I’m concerned, there’s not an option that’s not on the table.”
AD
In the same interview, Griffin also suggested certain top Democrats mighty be executed for treason, citing Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D).
“You get to pick your poison: you either go before a firing squad, or you get the end of the rope,” Griffin said.
AD
It’s exactly the kind of thing Trump does: He’s saying this thing, but he’s also saying that he’s not really saying this thing, and it’s your fault for misinterpreting.
But if there were any doubt that Trump was deliberately injecting this into the national dialogue, you only need to look at how many times he’s done this before.
Early in the 2016 election, Trump downplayed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s killing of journalists by saying the United States kills people too. He would later repeatedly and conspicuously allude to the idea that he himself would kill journalists — while making sure to dismiss it.
AD
“And then they said, you know, [Putin has] killed reporters, and I don’t like that. I’m totally against that,” Trump said. “By the way, I hate some of these people, but I’d never kill him. I hate them. No, I think — no, these people, honestly — I’ll be honest, I’ll be honest. I would never kill them. I would never do that.”
AD
Trump then jokingly suggested he might reconsider. “Uh, let’s see. Meh?” he said. “No, I wouldn’t. I would never kill them."
(Trump during a meeting with Putin in 2019 would seemingly return to this idea, saying “Get rid of them” about journalists he didn’t like and saying “you don’t have this problem in Russia.”)
Trump also bonded with Putin over a scorn for journalists. “Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn't it? You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.”“We also have,” Putin answered, in English. “It’s the same.”They shared a chuckle. pic.twitter.com/atGGYxnwfc— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) June 28, 2019
Later in the 2016 campaign, Trump obliquely referred to an armed uprising against Hillary Clinton’s judicial picks, saying there would be nothing you could do about them — “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.”
AD
In 2019 at a rally, Trumped asked what could be done about illegal immigrants crossing the board, to which one rallygoer responded, “Shoot them.” Trump replied, “That’s only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.”
After the tragedy in Charlottesville in 2017, Trump retweeted and then deleted a video depicting a train running over a CNN reporter.
AD
In 2019, Trump also toyed with the idea of the military, police and Bikers for Trump getting violent with Antifa. “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” He offered similar comments at a rally in Missouri, saying, “But they’re peaceful people, and Antifa and all — they’d better hope they stay that way. I hope they stay that way. I hope they stay that way.”
AD
He hopes they stay that way, but he’s happy to repeatedly raise the specter of violence against people he dislikes — while clarifying that he’s not advocating it. Plenty of people will believe these musing are being exaggerated and taken out of context, but the thrust of all of them is unmistakable and consistent. It’s like that old, stereotypical mafia expression, “It’d be a shame if something happened to XYZ."
It’s the same trick Griffin played in the video, and it’s the kind of rhetoric that, however hedged, is clearly purposeful and part of a long-running calculation.
AD
As I wrote after the bikers comment:
The idea that anything like the scenes Trump is describing would ever happen is difficult to believe. But that’s not really the point. Musing about this kind of thing is a great way to plant a seed in certain people’s minds, and the fact that Trump keeps fertilizing that seed shouldn’t escape notice.

If there was ever a tweet tailor-made for promotion by President Trump, it might be this one: A video by an account called “Cowboys for Trump” in which the speaker begins by saying, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” The speaker quickly qualifies that he’s not speaking literally.

At precisely midnight, the president felt this was the kind of message that people needed to see. “Thank you Cowboys. See you in New Mexico!” he said in a retweet.

What lay ahead was entirely predictable. People are rightly pointing out that a president just promoted the idea of dead Democrats. Trump will have the kind of plausible deniability he craves — the guy even said he wasn’t being literal! — and the world will keep turning.

AD

But the speaker has also made clear he wasn’t being entirely figurative. And Trump’s history with this particular kind of thing makes clear he knows exactly what he’s injecting into the national dialogue.

AD

The video is actually more than a week old, having caused a stir back then. The speaker, an Otero County, N.M., commissioner named Couy Griffin, has already been disavowed by the New Mexico Republican Party, even if he was just speaking figuratively.

The Republican Party of New Mexico wants to state for the record that any statements, whether in jest or serious about harming another individual are just plain wrong.

“The Republican Party of New Mexico wants to state for the record that any statements, whether in jest or serious about harming another individual are just plain wrong,” the party said in a tweet on May 20. The Young Republicans of New Mexico have also called for him to apologize.

AD

Griffin initially declined to back down and claimed persecution, though he eventually said he “could’ve chosen a different verbiage, you know. I guess I need to be more careful when I choose the words that I speak.”

But his other comments indicated he’s not entirely discounting the idea of violence or dead Democrats.

AD

In the same remarks, Griffin said that a “Plan B” after “Plan A” of winning elections would be some kind of uprising. “If we have to get shoulder-to-shoulder and create posses and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our great sheriffs, we’ll fight you at the county lines, but we’re not letting you have our guns,” he said.

He was later asked by the Daily Beast whether protesters against coronavirus-related restrictions might resort to violence, and responded, “I’ll tell you what, partner, as far as I’m concerned, there’s not an option that’s not on the table.”

“You get to pick your poison: you either go before a firing squad, or you get the end of the rope,” Griffin said.

AD

It’s exactly the kind of thing Trump does: He’s saying this thing, but he’s also saying that he’s not really saying this thing, and it’s your fault for misinterpreting.

But if there were any doubt that Trump was deliberately injecting this into the national dialogue, you only need to look at how many times he’s done this before.

Early in the 2016 election, Trump downplayed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s killing of journalists by saying the United States kills people too. He would later repeatedly and conspicuously allude to the idea that he himself would kill journalists — while making sure to dismiss it.

AD

“And then they said, you know, [Putin has] killed reporters, and I don’t like that. I’m totally against that,” Trump said. “By the way, I hate some of these people, but I’d never kill him. I hate them. No, I think — no, these people, honestly — I’ll be honest, I’ll be honest. I would never kill them. I would never do that.”

AD

Trump then jokingly suggested he might reconsider. “Uh, let’s see. Meh?” he said. “No, I wouldn’t. I would never kill them."

(Trump during a meeting with Putin in 2019 would seemingly return to this idea, saying “Get rid of them” about journalists he didn’t like and saying “you don’t have this problem in Russia.”)

Trump also bonded with Putin over a scorn for journalists.

“Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn't it? You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.”

Later in the 2016 campaign, Trump obliquely referred to an armed uprising against Hillary Clinton’s judicial picks, saying there would be nothing you could do about them — “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.”

AD

In 2019 at a rally, Trumped asked what could be done about illegal immigrants crossing the board, to which one rallygoer responded, “Shoot them.” Trump replied, “That’s only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.”

After the tragedy in Charlottesville in 2017, Trump retweeted and then deleted a video depicting a train running over a CNN reporter.

AD

In 2019, Trump also toyed with the idea of the military, police and Bikers for Trump getting violent with Antifa. “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” He offered similar comments at a rally in Missouri, saying, “But they’re peaceful people, and Antifa and all — they’d better hope they stay that way. I hope they stay that way. I hope they stay that way.”

AD

He hopes they stay that way, but he’s happy to repeatedly raise the specter of violence against people he dislikes — while clarifying that he’s not advocating it. Plenty of people will believe these musing are being exaggerated and taken out of context, but the thrust of all of them is unmistakable and consistent. It’s like that old, stereotypical mafia expression, “It’d be a shame if something happened to XYZ."

It’s the same trick Griffin played in the video, and it’s the kind of rhetoric that, however hedged, is clearly purposeful and part of a long-running calculation.

AD

As I wrote after the bikers comment:

The idea that anything like the scenes Trump is describing would ever happen is difficult to believe. But that’s not really the point. Musing about this kind of thing is a great way to plant a seed in certain people’s minds, and the fact that Trump keeps fertilizing that seed shouldn’t escape notice.

]]>
Aaron Blakehttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttp://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9499/13579652100,000 Lives Lost to COVID-19. What Did They Teach Us?2020-05-27T13:04:00.000-07:00by Caroline Chen
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
The United States has now recorded 100,000 deaths due to the coronavirus.
It’s a moment to collectively grieve and reflect.
Even as we mourn for those we knew, cry for those we loved and consider also those who have died uncounted, I hope that we can also resolve to learn more, test better, hold our leaders accountable and better protect our citizens so we do not have to reach another grim milestone.
Help Us Report on Coronavirus
Are you a public health worker, medical provider, elected official, patient or other COVID-19 expert? Help make sure our journalism is responsible and focused on the right issues.
Note: If you develop emergency warning signs for COVID-19, such as difficulty breathing or bluish lips, get medical attention immediately. The CDC has more information on what to do if you are sick.
Through public records requests and other reporting, ProPublica has found example after example of delays, mistakes and missed opportunities. The CDC took weeks to fix its faulty test. In Seattle, 33,000 fans attended a soccer match, even after the top local health official said he wanted to end mass gatherings. Houston went ahead with a livestock show and rodeo that typically draws 2.5 million people, until evidence of community spread shut it down after eight days. Nebraska kept a meatpacking plant open that health officials wanted to shut down, and cases from the plant subsequently skyrocketed. And in New York, the epicenter of the pandemic, political infighting between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio hampered communication and slowed decision making at a time when speed was critical to stop the virus’ exponential spread.
COVID-19 has also laid bare many long-standing inequities and failings in America’s health care system. It is devastating, but not surprising, to learn that many of those who have been most harmed by the virus are also Americans who have long suffered from historical social injustices that left them particularly susceptible to the disease.
This massive loss of life wasn’t inevitable. It wasn’t simply unfortunate and regrettable. Even without a vaccine or cure, better mitigation measures could have prevented infections from happening in the first place; more testing capacity could have allowed patients to be identified and treated earlier.
The COVID-19 pandemic is not over, far from it.
Morganville, New Jersey, May 9: Flowers are laid on a COVID-19 victim’s grave at a Muslim cemetery.
(Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
At this moment, the questions we need to ask are: How do we prevent the next 100,000 deaths from happening? How do we better protect our most vulnerable in the coming months? Even while we mourn, how can we take action, so we do not repeat this horror all over again?
Here’s what we’ve learned so far.
Though we’ve long known about infection control problems in nursing homes, COVID-19 got in and ran roughshod.
New Hope, Minnesota, May 19: Jeff Johnson and his mother, Kathy Johnson, visit her husband, Michael, at the North Ridge Health and Rehab nursing home.
(Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Star Tribune via Getty Images)
From the first weeks of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, when the virus tore through the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, nursing homes and long-term care facilities have emerged as one of the deadliest settings. As of May 21, there have been around 35,000 deaths of staff and residents in nursing homes and long-term care facilities, according to the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.
Yet the facilities have continued to struggle with basic infection control. Federal inspectors have found homes with insufficient staff and a lack of personal protective equipment. Others have failed to maintain social distancing among residents, according to inspection reports ProPublica reviewed. Desperate family members have had to become detectives and activists, one even going as far as staging a midnight rescue of her loved one as the virus spread through a Queens, New York, assisted living facility.
What now? The risk to the elderly will not decrease as time goes by — more than any other population, they will need the highest levels of protection until the pandemic is over. The CEO of the industry’s trade group told my colleague Charles Ornstein: “Just like hospitals, we have called for help. In our case, nobody has listened.” More can be done to protect our nursing home and long term care population. This means regular testing of both staff and residents, adequate protective gear and a realistic way to isolate residents who test positive.
Racial disparities in health care are pervasive in medicine, as they have been in COVID-19 deaths.
New York, April 8: Rosalyn Washington’s husband, Gary, died from COVID-19 the day before their wedding anniversary.
(Sara Naomi Lewkowicz/The New York Times/Redux)
Left: Chicago, April 24: The funeral of Joseph R. James, who died of COVID-19. Right: New Orleans, May 7: The funeral of Bessie Lacoste.
(Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images; Annie Flanagan/The New York Times/Redux)
African Americans have contracted and died of the coronavirus at higher rates across the country. This is due to myriad factors, including more limited access to medical care as well as environmental, economic and political factors that put them at higher risk of chronic conditions. When ProPublica examined the first 100 recorded victims of the coronavirus in Chicago, we found that 70 were black. African Americans make up 30% of the city’s population.
What now? States should make sure that safety-net hospitals, which serve a large portion of low-income and uninsured patients regardless of their ability to pay, and hospitals in neighborhoods that serve predominantly black communities, are well-supplied and sufficiently staffed during the crisis. More can also be done to encourage African American patients to not delay seeking care, even when they have “innocent symptoms” like a cough or low-grade fever, especially when they suffer other health conditions like diabetes.
Racial disparities go beyond medicine, to other aspects of the pandemic. Data shows that black people are already being disproportionately arrested for social distancing violations, a measure that can undercut public health efforts and further raise the risk of infection, especially when enforcement includes time in a crowded jail.
Essential workers had little choice but to work during COVID-19, but adequate safeguards weren’t put in place to protect them.
Left: Chicago, May 9: Postal workers gather to honor Unique Clay, 31, a letter carrier who died from complications from COVID-19 a week after giving birth to her third child. Right: New York, May 21: People read the names of COVID-19 victims as they’re projected onto the side of a building.
(Scott Olson/Getty Images; Bebeto Matthews/AP)
We’ve known from the beginning there are some measures that help protect us from the virus, such as physical distancing. Yet millions of Americans haven’t been able to heed that advice, and have had no choice but to risk their health daily as they’ve gone to work shoulder-to-shoulder in meat-packing plants, rung up groceries while being forbidden to wear gloves, or delivered the mail. Those who are undocumented live with the additional fear of being caught by immigration authorities if they go to a hospital for testing or treatment.
What now? Research has shown that there’s a much higher risk of transmission in enclosed spaces than outdoors, so providing good ventilation, adequate physical distancing, and protective gear as appropriate for workers in indoor spaces is critical for safety. We also now know that patients are likely most infectious right before or at the time when symptoms start appearing, so if workplaces are generous about their sick leave policies, workers can err on the side of caution if they do feel unwell, and not have to choose between their livelihoods and their health. It’s also important to have adequate testing capacity, so infections can be caught before they turn into a large outbreak.
Frontline health care workers were not given adequate PPE and were sometimes fired for speaking up about it.
Left: Yonkers, New York, April 25: A funeral service for NYPD Detective Robert Cardona, who died from complications of COVID-19. Right: Los Angeles, May 6: Susanna Manukyan at a candlelight vigil for Celia Marcos, a fellow nurse, who died two days after testing positive for the coronavirus.
(Craig Ruttle/Redux; Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)
While health workers have not, thankfully, been dying at conspicuously higher rates, they continue to be susceptible to the virus due to their work. The national scramble for ventilators and personal protective equipment has exposed the just-in-time nature of hospitals’ inventories: Nurses across the country have had to work with expired N95 masks, or no masks at all. Health workers have been suspended, or put on unpaid leave, because they didn’t see eye to eye with their administrators on the amount of protective gear they needed to keep themselves safe while caring for patients.
First responders — EMTs, firefighters and paramedics — are often forgotten when it comes to funding, even though they are the first point of contact with sick patients. The lack of a coherent system nationwide meant that some first responders felt prepared, while others were begging for masks at local hospitals.
What now? As states reopen, it will be important to closely track hospital capacity, and if cases rise and threaten their medical systems’ ability to care for patients, governments will need to be ready to pause or even dial back reopening measures. It should go without saying that adequate protective gear is a must. I also hope that hospital administrators are thinking about mental health care for their staffs. Doctors and nurses have told us of the immense strain of caring for patients whom they don’t know how to save, while also worrying about getting sick themselves, or carrying the virus home to their loved ones. Even “heroes” need supplies and support.
What we still have to learn:
Left: Oceanside, New York, April 28: After testing positive, Manuel Carchipulla watches via FaceTime while his wife, Diana Garcia, holds their newborn, Danaey, at Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital. Right: New York, May 4: Funeral director Lily Sage Weinrieb calls relatives for a virtual viewing of a COVID-19 victim before cremation.
(Jeffrey Basinger/Newsday RM via Getty Images; Misha Friedman/Getty Images)
Elizabeth, New Jersey, March 27: Shawn’te Harvell, funeral director at the Smith Funeral Home, prepares a visitation for a person who died from COVID-19.
(Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Redux)
Left: New York, April 8: Mourners keep their distance during a funeral procession for Rabbi Leibel Groner. Right: Morganville, New Jersey, May 9: Pakistani immigrant families gather to pray for relatives who died of COVID-19.
(Kirsten Luce/The New York Times/Redux; Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
There continue to be questions on which data is lacking, such as the effects of the coronavirus on pregnant women. Without evidence-based research, pregnant women have been left to make decisions on their own, sometimes trying to limit their exposure against their employer’s wishes.
Similarly, there’s a paucity of data on children’s risk level and their role in transmission. While we can confidently say that it’s rare for children to get very ill if they do get infected, there’s not as much information on whether children are as infectious as adults. Answering that question would not just help parents make decisions (Can I let my kid go to day care when we live with Grandma?) but also help officials make evidence-based decisions on how and when to reopen schools.
There’s some research I don’t want to rush. Experts say the bar for evidence should be extremely high when it comes to a vaccine’s safety and benefit. It makes sense that we might be willing to use a therapeutic with less evidence on critically ill patients, knowing that without any intervention, they would soon die. A vaccine, however, is intended to be given to vast numbers of healthy people. So yes, we have to move urgently, but we must still take the time to gather robust data.
Our nation’s leaders have many choices to make in the coming weeks and months. I hope they will heed the advice of scientists, doctors and public health officials, and prioritize the protection of everyone from essential workers to people in prisons and homeless shelters who does not have the privilege of staying home for the duration of the pandemic.
The coronavirus is a wily adversary. We may ultimately defeat it with a vaccine or effective therapeutics. But what we’ve learned from the first 100,000 deaths is that we can save lives with the oldest mitigation tactics in the public health arsenal — and that being slow to act comes with a terrible cost.
I refuse to succumb to fatalism, to just accepting the ever higher death toll as inevitable. I want us to make it harder for this virus to take each precious life from us. And I believe we can.
New Orleans, May 2: Doves are released at Patricia Jackson Joseph​’s funeral at Green Street Cemetery following the rules of​ the moment: gatherings of no ​more than 10 people, swift bur​ials and no funeral parades.
(Annie Flanagan/The New York Ti​mes/Redux)
Tell Us More About Coronavirus
Are you a public health worker, medical provider, elected official, patient or other COVID-19 expert? Help make sure our journalism is responsible and focused on the right issues.
by Caroline Chen

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The United States has now recorded 100,000 deaths due to the coronavirus.

It’s a moment to collectively grieve and reflect.

Even as we mourn for those we knew, cry for those we loved and consider also those who have died uncounted, I hope that we can also resolve to learn more, test better, hold our leaders accountable and better protect our citizens so we do not have to reach another grim milestone.

Through public records requests and other reporting, ProPublica has found example after example of delays, mistakes and missed opportunities. The CDC took weeks to fix its faulty test. In Seattle, 33,000 fans attended a soccer match, even after the top local health official said he wanted to end mass gatherings. Houston went ahead with a livestock show and rodeo that typically draws 2.5 million people, until evidence of community spread shut it down after eight days. Nebraska kept a meatpacking plant open that health officials wanted to shut down, and cases from the plant subsequently skyrocketed. And in New York, the epicenter of the pandemic, political infighting between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio hampered communication and slowed decision making at a time when speed was critical to stop the virus’ exponential spread.

COVID-19 has also laid bare many long-standing inequities and failings in America’s health care system. It is devastating, but not surprising, to learn that many of those who have been most harmed by the virus are also Americans who have long suffered from historical social injustices that left them particularly susceptible to the disease.

This massive loss of life wasn’t inevitable. It wasn’t simply unfortunate and regrettable. Even without a vaccine or cure, better mitigation measures could have prevented infections from happening in the first place; more testing capacity could have allowed patients to be identified and treated earlier.

The COVID-19 pandemic is not over, far from it.

Morganville, New Jersey, May 9: Flowers are laid on a COVID-19 victim’s grave at a Muslim cemetery.
(Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

At this moment, the questions we need to ask are: How do we prevent the next 100,000 deaths from happening? How do we better protect our most vulnerable in the coming months? Even while we mourn, how can we take action, so we do not repeat this horror all over again?

Here’s what we’ve learned so far.

Though we’ve long known about infection control problems in nursing homes, COVID-19 got in and ran roughshod.

From the first weeks of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, when the virus tore through the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, nursing homes and long-term care facilities have emerged as one of the deadliest settings. As of May 21, there have been around 35,000 deaths of staff and residents in nursing homes and long-term care facilities, according to the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.

Yet the facilities have continued to struggle with basic infection control. Federal inspectors have found homes with insufficient staff and a lack of personal protective equipment. Others have failed to maintain social distancing among residents, according to inspection reports ProPublica reviewed. Desperate family members have had to become detectives and activists, one even going as far as staging a midnight rescue of her loved one as the virus spread through a Queens, New York, assisted living facility.

What now? The risk to the elderly will not decrease as time goes by — more than any other population, they will need the highest levels of protection until the pandemic is over. The CEO of the industry’s trade group told my colleague Charles Ornstein: “Just like hospitals, we have called for help. In our case, nobody has listened.” More can be done to protect our nursing home and long term care population. This means regular testing of both staff and residents, adequate protective gear and a realistic way to isolate residents who test positive.

Racial disparities in health care are pervasive in medicine, as they have been in COVID-19 deaths.

New York, April 8: Rosalyn Washington’s husband, Gary, died from COVID-19 the day before their wedding anniversary.
(Sara Naomi Lewkowicz/The New York Times/Redux)Left: Chicago, April 24: The funeral of Joseph R. James, who died of COVID-19. Right: New Orleans, May 7: The funeral of Bessie Lacoste.
(Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images; Annie Flanagan/The New York Times/Redux)

African Americans have contracted and died of the coronavirus at higher rates across the country. This is due to myriad factors, including more limited access to medical care as well as environmental, economic and political factors that put them at higher risk of chronic conditions. When ProPublica examined the first 100 recorded victims of the coronavirus in Chicago, we found that 70 were black. African Americans make up 30% of the city’s population.

What now? States should make sure that safety-net hospitals, which serve a large portion of low-income and uninsured patients regardless of their ability to pay, and hospitals in neighborhoods that serve predominantly black communities, are well-supplied and sufficiently staffed during the crisis. More can also be done to encourage African American patients to not delay seeking care, even when they have “innocent symptoms” like a cough or low-grade fever, especially when they suffer other health conditions like diabetes.

Racial disparities go beyond medicine, to other aspects of the pandemic. Data shows that black people are already being disproportionately arrested for social distancing violations, a measure that can undercut public health efforts and further raise the risk of infection, especially when enforcement includes time in a crowded jail.

Essential workers had little choice but to work during COVID-19, but adequate safeguards weren’t put in place to protect them.

Left: Chicago, May 9: Postal workers gather to honor Unique Clay, 31, a letter carrier who died from complications from COVID-19 a week after giving birth to her third child. Right: New York, May 21: People read the names of COVID-19 victims as they’re projected onto the side of a building.
(Scott Olson/Getty Images; Bebeto Matthews/AP)

We’ve known from the beginning there are some measures that help protect us from the virus, such as physical distancing. Yet millions of Americans haven’t been able to heed that advice, and have had no choice but to risk their health daily as they’ve gone to work shoulder-to-shoulder in meat-packing plants, rung up groceries while being forbidden to wear gloves, or delivered the mail. Those who are undocumented live with the additional fear of being caught by immigration authorities if they go to a hospital for testing or treatment.

What now? Research has shown that there’s a much higher risk of transmission in enclosed spaces than outdoors, so providing good ventilation, adequate physical distancing, and protective gear as appropriate for workers in indoor spaces is critical for safety. We also now know that patients are likely most infectious right before or at the time when symptoms start appearing, so if workplaces are generous about their sick leave policies, workers can err on the side of caution if they do feel unwell, and not have to choose between their livelihoods and their health. It’s also important to have adequate testing capacity, so infections can be caught before they turn into a large outbreak.

Frontline health care workers were not given adequate PPE and were sometimes fired for speaking up about it.

Left: Yonkers, New York, April 25: A funeral service for NYPD Detective Robert Cardona, who died from complications of COVID-19. Right: Los Angeles, May 6: Susanna Manukyan at a candlelight vigil for Celia Marcos, a fellow nurse, who died two days after testing positive for the coronavirus.
(Craig Ruttle/Redux; Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)

While health workers have not, thankfully, been dying at conspicuously higher rates, they continue to be susceptible to the virus due to their work. The national scramble for ventilators and personal protective equipment has exposed the just-in-time nature of hospitals’ inventories: Nurses across the country have had to work with expired N95 masks, or no masks at all. Health workers have been suspended, or put on unpaid leave, because they didn’t see eye to eye with their administrators on the amount of protective gear they needed to keep themselves safe while caring for patients.

First responders — EMTs, firefighters and paramedics — are often forgotten when it comes to funding, even though they are the first point of contact with sick patients. The lack of a coherent system nationwide meant that some first responders felt prepared, while others were begging for masks at local hospitals.

What now? As states reopen, it will be important to closely track hospital capacity, and if cases rise and threaten their medical systems’ ability to care for patients, governments will need to be ready to pause or even dial back reopening measures. It should go without saying that adequate protective gear is a must. I also hope that hospital administrators are thinking about mental health care for their staffs. Doctors and nurses have told us of the immense strain of caring for patients whom they don’t know how to save, while also worrying about getting sick themselves, or carrying the virus home to their loved ones. Even “heroes” need supplies and support.

What we still have to learn:

Left: Oceanside, New York, April 28: After testing positive, Manuel Carchipulla watches via FaceTime while his wife, Diana Garcia, holds their newborn, Danaey, at Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital. Right: New York, May 4: Funeral director Lily Sage Weinrieb calls relatives for a virtual viewing of a COVID-19 victim before cremation.
(Jeffrey Basinger/Newsday RM via Getty Images; Misha Friedman/Getty Images)Elizabeth, New Jersey, March 27: Shawn’te Harvell, funeral director at the Smith Funeral Home, prepares a visitation for a person who died from COVID-19.
(Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Redux)Left: New York, April 8: Mourners keep their distance during a funeral procession for Rabbi Leibel Groner. Right: Morganville, New Jersey, May 9: Pakistani immigrant families gather to pray for relatives who died of COVID-19.
(Kirsten Luce/The New York Times/Redux; Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

There continue to be questions on which data is lacking, such as the effects of the coronavirus on pregnant women. Without evidence-based research, pregnant women have been left to make decisions on their own, sometimes trying to limit their exposure against their employer’s wishes.

Similarly, there’s a paucity of data on children’s risk level and their role in transmission. While we can confidently say that it’s rare for children to get very ill if they do get infected, there’s not as much information on whether children are as infectious as adults. Answering that question would not just help parents make decisions (Can I let my kid go to day care when we live with Grandma?) but also help officials make evidence-based decisions on how and when to reopen schools.

There’s some research I don’t want to rush. Experts say the bar for evidence should be extremely high when it comes to a vaccine’s safety and benefit. It makes sense that we might be willing to use a therapeutic with less evidence on critically ill patients, knowing that without any intervention, they would soon die. A vaccine, however, is intended to be given to vast numbers of healthy people. So yes, we have to move urgently, but we must still take the time to gather robust data.

Our nation’s leaders have many choices to make in the coming weeks and months. I hope they will heed the advice of scientists, doctors and public health officials, and prioritize the protection of everyone from essential workers to people in prisons and homeless shelters who does not have the privilege of staying home for the duration of the pandemic.

The coronavirus is a wily adversary. We may ultimately defeat it with a vaccine or effective therapeutics. But what we’ve learned from the first 100,000 deaths is that we can save lives with the oldest mitigation tactics in the public health arsenal — and that being slow to act comes with a terrible cost.

I refuse to succumb to fatalism, to just accepting the ever higher death toll as inevitable. I want us to make it harder for this virus to take each precious life from us. And I believe we can.

New Orleans, May 2: Doves are released at Patricia Jackson Joseph​’s funeral at Green Street Cemetery following the rules of​ the moment: gatherings of no ​more than 10 people, swift bur​ials and no funeral parades.
(Annie Flanagan/The New York Ti​mes/Redux)

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by Caroline Chenhttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttps://www.npr.org/2020/05/27/863011399/trump-threatens-to-shut-down-social-media-after-twitter-adds-warning-on-his-twee?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=newsTrump Threatens To Shut Down Social Media After Twitter Adds Warning On His Tweets2020-05-27T07:49:00.000-07:00Enlarge this image
President Trump, who uses Twitter as his primary form of communicating, has long accused Facebook and Twitter of censoring conservative views.
Alex Brandon/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Alex Brandon/AP
President Trump, who uses Twitter as his primary form of communicating, has long accused Facebook and Twitter of censoring conservative views.
Alex Brandon/AP
Tensions between President Trump and Twitter escalated Wednesday as he threatened to "strongly regulate" or shut down social media platforms, which he accused of silencing conservative viewpoints. Trump's threat came the day after Twitter added a fact-check warning to his tweets claiming that mail-in ballots are fraudulent. "Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices," Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. "We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can't let a more sophisticated version of that.... happen again."
Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that....— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020

President Trump, who uses Twitter as his primary form of communicating, has long accused Facebook and Twitter of censoring conservative views.
Alex Brandon/AP
hide caption

toggle caption

Alex Brandon/AP

President Trump, who uses Twitter as his primary form of communicating, has long accused Facebook and Twitter of censoring conservative views.

Alex Brandon/AP

Tensions between President Trump and Twitter escalated Wednesday as he threatened to "strongly regulate" or shut down social media platforms, which he accused of silencing conservative viewpoints.

Trump's threat came the day after Twitter added a fact-check warning to his tweets claiming that mail-in ballots are fraudulent.

"Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices," Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. "We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can't let a more sophisticated version of that.... happen again."

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen. We saw what they attempted to do, and failed, in 2016. We can’t let a more sophisticated version of that....

It's unclear what Trump could do to crack down on social media platforms, but the power of Silicon Valley tech giants has been the subject of investigations by federal and state agencies as well as congressional hearings.

Trump, who uses Twitter as his primary form of communicating, has long accused Facebook and Twitter of censoring conservative views. "We're not going to be silenced," he said last summer at a White House meeting with conservative social media personalities.

In June 2019, Twitter created a warning label to flag and suppress political tweets that break its rules on acceptable speech. And earlier this month, the company announced it would label "potentially harmful" tweets about the coronavirus.

In October, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that his social media platform will stop running political ads, citing online ads' "significant risks to politics."

In congressional testimony in 2018, Dorsey said, "Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions. ... We believe strongly in being impartial, and we strive to enforce our rules impartially."

]]>
Avie Schneiderhttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttps://www.axios.com/hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus-increase-death-e530f64b-feb2-47bc-8d4b-6d98f79ed5cc.htmlHydroxychloroquine increases risk of death in coronavirus patients despite Trump's praises2020-05-22T08:23:00.000-07:00Coronavirus patients who took hydroxychloroquine or its related drug chloroquine were more likely to die or develop an irregular heart rhythm that can lead to sudden cardiac death, compared to those who did nothing, a retrospective review published in The Lancet shows.Why it matters: Despite warnings from the Food and Drug Administration, President Trump has insisted the anti-malarial drug as a "game-changer" and admitted he has taken it as a preventative even though the drug is unproven.The big picture: The medical journal's review consisted of 96,000 hospitalized patients diagnosed with the coronavirus in six continents, the largest analysis of medical records on the drug, between Dec. 20, 2019, and April 14, 2020.About 15,000 of the 96,000 patients were treated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine alone, or combined with an antibiotic known as a macrolide.The findings: Those given the drug alone had a 34% increased risk of dying and a 137% increased risk of heart arrhythmias. Those who took the drug paired with an antibiotic had a 45% increased risk of death and a 411% risk of heart arrhythmias. This combination is one President Trump has been encouraging. The mean age of patients was 54 years old and 53% were men. Those excluded were those on mechanical ventilators or who received remdesivir, an antiviral drug made by Gilead Sciences.The bottom line: The FDA has adamantly warned against taking hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine because of the risk of heart complications and unproven claims it prevents COVID-19 infections.Go deeper: Stunned Fox News host reacts to Trump taking hydroxychloroquine
Coronavirus patients who took hydroxychloroquine or its related drug chloroquine were more likely to die or develop an irregular heart rhythm that can lead to sudden cardiac death, compared to those who did nothing, a retrospective review published in The Lancet shows.

The big picture: The medical journal's review consisted of 96,000 hospitalized patients diagnosed with the coronavirus in six continents, the largest analysis of medical records on the drug, between Dec. 20, 2019, and April 14, 2020.

About 15,000 of the 96,000 patients were treated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine alone, or combined with an antibiotic known as a macrolide.

The findings: Those given the drug alone had a 34% increased risk of dying and a 137% increased risk of heart arrhythmias.

Those who took the drug paired with an antibiotic had a 45% increased risk of death and a 411% risk of heart arrhythmias. This combination is one President Trump has been encouraging.

The mean age of patients was 54 years old and 53% were men.

Those excluded were those on mechanical ventilators or who received remdesivir, an antiviral drug made by Gilead Sciences.

The bottom line: The FDA has adamantly warned against taking hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine because of the risk of heart complications and unproven claims it prevents COVID-19 infections.

]]>
Marisa Fernandezhttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttps://www.opb.org/news/article/covid-virus-spike-deschutes-county-linked-social-gatherings/Ahead Of Memorial Day, Spike In Deschutes County Cases Linked To Social Gatherings . News | OPB2020-05-22T07:49:00.000-07:00https://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/22/tucker-carlson-claims-theres-no-evidence-stay-at-home-orders-saved-lives-hes-wrong/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=wp_politicsTucker Carlson claims there’s ‘no evidence’ stay-at-home orders saved lives. He’s wrong.2020-05-22T07:31:00.000-07:00Tucker Carlson’s well-honed attitude of indignation has served him well during his tenure hosting the 8 p.m. hour on Fox News each weeknight. Whatever the subject, Carlson mixes exasperated-slash-bemused facial expressions with aggrievement-riddled commentary, revealing, over and over, how he and his viewers knew the truth while the experts — overwhelmingly elitists and overwhelmingly liberal — got it wrong. (Carlson has attacked me personally on his program, notably doing so a month ago after I wrote about Trump’s embrace of hydroxychloroquine.)
At times, this approach has contrasted with President Trump’s political inclinations, as when Carlson last week criticized the idea that the administration might resume funding to the World Health Organization. In short order, Trump, an avid watcher, backtracked. Usually, though, Carlson’s debate-club shtick aligns with Trump’s politics, and the two operate in happy symbiosis.
Often, Carlson goes further than Trump, providing (intentionally or not) space for the president to seem more moderate than he might otherwise. That was the approach Carlson took on Thursday night.
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During his opening monologue, Carlson argued against stay-at-home orders that have been enacted across the country to contain the coronavirus, which emerged late last year. Sure, such orders were encouraged by the White House two months ago, but since then, Trump has made clear that he wants them to end — and Fox News’s on-air personalities and guests have worked to bolster that case.
The heart of Carlson’s claim was that the orders didn’t work and, perhaps, were dangerous.
“Here’s what you need to know and what they’re not going to tell you,” Carlson said. “There is, as of tonight, precisely no evidence that the lockdowns in America saved lives anywhere. In fact, it’s possible that mass quarantines killed people.”
AD
As one of the “they” to whom Carlson is referring, I’ll admit that I agree: I will not tell you that there is no evidence that the stay-at-home orders saved lives because there is obvious evidence that they did.
AD
Consider a handful of states that enacted stay-at-home orders, including New York, where the outbreak was the most severe last month. Remember that the effects of a stay-at-home order on new cases and on deaths isn’t immediate. The virus can take two weeks before symptoms manifest; once they do, it takes several more days before those unlucky enough to succumb to it do so.
Here’s how new daily cases shifted relative to stay-at-home orders in a number of places.
We’ve highlighted the two-week window after the implementation of the stay-at-home order in each place and, because this is a seven-day average of new cases, the third week as well, since its average includes part of that two-week window. What you see above doesn’t offer an even picture: New Jersey’s new cases plateaued after its stay-at-home order, for example, while Pennsylvania saw a slow decline.
AD
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But in New York alone, there’s clearly a correlation between the order and the decline in cases — and, further out on the timeline, fewer deaths. Is this a big coincidence, that people stopped interacting as they normally do and the virus then stopped spreading as rapidly? Carlson claimed that it was obvious that the stay-at-home orders would be more dangerous since “forcing people into close quarters all day obviously increases the odds of infecting family members.” Of course, if none of those people are infected and they actually stay at home, there’s very little opportunity for infections to spread from that point forward.
Had Carlson said there was no peer-reviewed study demonstrating that the stay-at-home order in New York saved lives, he might have been right. The above, though, is clearly evidence that the stay-at-home order in New York saved lives.
In fact, a study undertaken by researchers at Columbia University found that the country’s stay-at-home orders came too late. Had they been introduced a week earlier, 36,000 lives could have been saved.
AD
AD
Carlson had a “study” of his own, though: analysis from a quantitative strategist at the financial firm J.P. Morgan. That strategist compared the rate of spread of the virus from the end of the stay-at-home orders in states to the rate now. It’s a simple comparison, showing that most states that scaled back distancing efforts had slower rates of spread now than they did at the time the efforts were scaled back.
The J.P. Morgan chart shows that states such as Iowa, Mississippi and South Dakota stand out as having lower rates of spread now than when the restrictions were ended.
“Overall, ending the lockdowns was associated with a slower spread of the virus,” Carlson said, adding a melodramatic “amazing” to his discovery.
AD
In fact, the data show something different and less amazing.
The J.P. Morgan analysis simply compares two points in time: then and now. Importantly, it also compares the point at which restrictions were scaled back with the current moment — ignoring that the effects of the stay-at-home orders would linger for weeks in reduced infection rates. For the same reason that we gave a two-week window above for the orders to be felt, we need to similarly give a two-week window after they are scaled back to see what happened.
The site rt.live tracks the effective rate of spread in each state over time. If we take the states named above and throw in Georgia, poster-child for quick reopening, here’s how the rate of spread in each state has changed.
See what happened? Yes, the rate in Mississippi and Georgia is lower — but the declines have been flat since the two-week window ended. The picture above offers a lot more information than the J.P. Morgan analysis, and it doesn’t exactly bolster the case that the stay-at-home orders “killed people” — Carlson’s hyperbolic extension of his idea that rates dropped once stay-at-home orders were lifted.
AD
AD
The thrust of Carlson’s complaint isn’t really about the utility of the stay-at-home orders. Instead, it’s just a tool for bolstering his main argument: The elites are stealing your freedom and demanding fealty.
“Rattling you was exactly the point” of offering warnings about the spread of the virus, he claimed. “Stop thinking. Obey. That was the message.”
One can certainly discern some irony in the above paragraph.

Tucker Carlson’s well-honed attitude of indignation has served him well during his tenure hosting the 8 p.m. hour on Fox News each weeknight. Whatever the subject, Carlson mixes exasperated-slash-bemused facial expressions with aggrievement-riddled commentary, revealing, over and over, how he and his viewers knew the truth while the experts — overwhelmingly elitists and overwhelmingly liberal — got it wrong. (Carlson has attacked me personally on his program, notably doing so a month ago after I wrote about Trump’s embrace of hydroxychloroquine.)

At times, this approach has contrasted with President Trump’s political inclinations, as when Carlson last week criticized the idea that the administration might resume funding to the World Health Organization. In short order, Trump, an avid watcher, backtracked. Usually, though, Carlson’s debate-club shtick aligns with Trump’s politics, and the two operate in happy symbiosis.

Often, Carlson goes further than Trump, providing (intentionally or not) space for the president to seem more moderate than he might otherwise. That was the approach Carlson took on Thursday night.

AD

AD

During his opening monologue, Carlson argued against stay-at-home orders that have been enacted across the country to contain the coronavirus, which emerged late last year. Sure, such orders were encouraged by the White House two months ago, but since then, Trump has made clear that he wants them to end — and Fox News’s on-air personalities and guests have worked to bolster that case.

The heart of Carlson’s claim was that the orders didn’t work and, perhaps, were dangerous.

“Here’s what you need to know and what they’re not going to tell you,” Carlson said. “There is, as of tonight, precisely no evidence that the lockdowns in America saved lives anywhere. In fact, it’s possible that mass quarantines killed people.”

AD

As one of the “they” to whom Carlson is referring, I’ll admit that I agree: I will not tell you that there is no evidence that the stay-at-home orders saved lives because there is obvious evidence that they did.

AD

Consider a handful of states that enacted stay-at-home orders, including New York, where the outbreak was the most severe last month. Remember that the effects of a stay-at-home order on new cases and on deaths isn’t immediate. The virus can take two weeks before symptoms manifest; once they do, it takes several more days before those unlucky enough to succumb to it do so.

Here’s how new daily cases shifted relative to stay-at-home orders in a number of places.

We’ve highlighted the two-week window after the implementation of the stay-at-home order in each place and, because this is a seven-day average of new cases, the third week as well, since its average includes part of that two-week window. What you see above doesn’t offer an even picture: New Jersey’s new cases plateaued after its stay-at-home order, for example, while Pennsylvania saw a slow decline.

AD

AD

But in New York alone, there’s clearly a correlation between the order and the decline in cases — and, further out on the timeline, fewer deaths. Is this a big coincidence, that people stopped interacting as they normally do and the virus then stopped spreading as rapidly? Carlson claimed that it was obvious that the stay-at-home orders would be more dangerous since “forcing people into close quarters all day obviously increases the odds of infecting family members.” Of course, if none of those people are infected and they actually stay at home, there’s very little opportunity for infections to spread from that point forward.

Had Carlson said there was no peer-reviewed study demonstrating that the stay-at-home order in New York saved lives, he might have been right. The above, though, is clearly evidence that the stay-at-home order in New York saved lives.

In fact, a study undertaken by researchers at Columbia University found that the country’s stay-at-home orders came too late. Had they been introduced a week earlier, 36,000 lives could have been saved.

AD

AD

Carlson had a “study” of his own, though: analysis from a quantitative strategist at the financial firm J.P. Morgan. That strategist compared the rate of spread of the virus from the end of the stay-at-home orders in states to the rate now. It’s a simple comparison, showing that most states that scaled back distancing efforts had slower rates of spread now than they did at the time the efforts were scaled back.

The J.P. Morgan chart shows that states such as Iowa, Mississippi and South Dakota stand out as having lower rates of spread now than when the restrictions were ended.

“Overall, ending the lockdowns was associated with a slower spread of the virus,” Carlson said, adding a melodramatic “amazing” to his discovery.

AD

In fact, the data show something different and less amazing.

The J.P. Morgan analysis simply compares two points in time: then and now. Importantly, it also compares the point at which restrictions were scaled back with the current moment — ignoring that the effects of the stay-at-home orders would linger for weeks in reduced infection rates. For the same reason that we gave a two-week window above for the orders to be felt, we need to similarly give a two-week window after they are scaled back to see what happened.

The site rt.live tracks the effective rate of spread in each state over time. If we take the states named above and throw in Georgia, poster-child for quick reopening, here’s how the rate of spread in each state has changed.

See what happened? Yes, the rate in Mississippi and Georgia is lower — but the declines have been flat since the two-week window ended. The picture above offers a lot more information than the J.P. Morgan analysis, and it doesn’t exactly bolster the case that the stay-at-home orders “killed people” — Carlson’s hyperbolic extension of his idea that rates dropped once stay-at-home orders were lifted.

AD

AD

The thrust of Carlson’s complaint isn’t really about the utility of the stay-at-home orders. Instead, it’s just a tool for bolstering his main argument: The elites are stealing your freedom and demanding fealty.

“Rattling you was exactly the point” of offering warnings about the spread of the virus, he claimed. “Stop thinking. Obey. That was the message.”

]]>
by Lena V. Groeger and Ash Nguhttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttp://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9499/13552539You Don’t Need Invasive Tech for Successful Contact Tracing. Here’s How It Works.2020-05-19T04:00:00.000-07:00by Caroline Chen
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
I want you to mentally prepare yourself for a phone call that you could receive sometime over the course of this pandemic: in the next few months or year.
Your phone might ring, and when you pick it up, you may hear someone say, “Hi, I’m calling from the health department.” After verifying your identity, the person may say something like, “I’m afraid we have information that you were in close contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus.”
The person calling is what’s known as a contact tracer. As most states begin to lift restrictions on movement and people once more start to eat in restaurants, work in offices and get on public transit, these phone calls will become more frequent. State public health departments are hiring thousands of these workers, and experts are calling for more than 100,000 contact tracers to be deployed across America.
I can only imagine how I would feel if I got a call telling me that I had been in close contact with a COVID-19 patient — shocked, a little scared and possibly a bit in denial. But after spending a week talking to contact tracing experts across the country, and taking an online course as well, I think I’d also feel one more thing: empowered. Here’s why.
Contact Tracing Will Help Us Reopen Safely
Contact tracing is a public health strategy that has been used successfully to combat infectious disease outbreaks across the globe, from the 1930s, when it helped get rampant syphilis under control in the United States, to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
Fundamentally, contact tracing works by tracking down all the contacts of an infected person and then taking appropriate action to break the chain of transmission. In practice, that action will vary depending on the nature of the disease — obviously, you don’t need someone to self-isolate at home and have groceries delivered to them if a disease can only be transmitted sexually.
The current coronavirus has been particularly tricky to contain because patients can be contagious a few days before they display symptoms, and some infected people may never show symptoms at all. Furthermore, the time between the onset of symptoms from one case to another is estimated to be quite short, around four days. All these characteristics have helped the virus spread rapidly — and that means that tracers have to move very quickly to reach patients and their contacts in order to cut off new branches of infection.
Experts tell me that contact tracing is the key to safely reopening the economy.
Help Us Report on Coronavirus
Are you a public health worker, medical provider, elected official, patient or other COVID-19 expert? Help make sure our journalism is responsible and focused on the right issues.
Note: If you develop emergency warning signs for COVID-19, such as difficulty breathing or bluish lips, get medical attention immediately. The CDC has more information on what to do if you are sick.
“This narrative has emerged that either we lift all our social distancing measures and let the virus burn through the population, or we hunker down at home forever and let the economy collapse, but that is a false choice,” said Dr. Crystal Watson, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and lead author of a white paper on how the United States can scale up its abilities to identify and trace COVID-19 cases.
“We have this tool — contact tracing — and if we spend some effort and funding on actually building up our capacities, we can control transmission, get back to work much more safely and avoid unnecessary loss of thousands of lives.”
When a patient gets a coronavirus test, the lab reports the results back not only to the patient’s doctor, but also to the local health department. A contact tracer is assigned to the case and will call the person to ask about symptoms, to take down information about people the patient has been in close contact with recently, and to help draw up a plan for isolation, which could entail figuring out how to get groceries or medications delivered.
Current guidance by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends patients who test positive isolate themselves until the following three criteria are fulfilled: 10 days have passed since symptoms first appeared, the patient has had three full days with no fever, and other symptoms like cough or shortness of breath are also improving. For close contacts who have been exposed, the CDC recommends a 14-day quarantine after the last date of exposure. (“Isolation” is the term used for confirmed positive patients, “quarantine” is used for exposed contacts; practically speaking, what you need to do is the same — stay away from others.)
A contact will be told when they were exposed, but never who it was that exposed them to the virus; the health department keeps that information anonymous.
Since the isolation period for patients with the disease depends on symptoms, health department staff need to call back regularly to monitor their progression and help determine when they can safely leave home again. They also check in on quarantined contacts, to see if they are developing symptoms and may need to get tested.
How Does Contact Tracing Work?
In theory, the process sounds straightforward, but the details can be daunting. I had many questions, starting with: Who exactly counts as a contact?
For now, I am still working from home and have had no prolonged or close contact with anyone other than my husband. But when New York’s stay-at-home orders end, I wanted to know: If someone in my office got sick, would my whole newsroom have to go into quarantine? What happens if someone has a subway commute — would contact tracing break down?
The CDC defines a close contact as someone who was within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes, starting two days before the infected person began experiencing symptoms.
Public health workers will make decisions on a case by case basis, said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “You don’t want too many people slipping through the cracks, but at the same time, it’s a big ask, since you’re asking people to stay at home for two weeks.”
In my hypothetical scenario, a contact tracer might consider the office’s ventilation system, Plescia said, to help decide if a whole office needed to go into quarantine. (A case study of a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, concluded that currents from an air conditioner likely helped carry the virus from an infected person to two neighboring tables.) Another factor would be how well the patient remembered all of his or her interactions in the two days before symptoms began.
When it comes to public transit, the experts told me that transmission risk would be much higher if a patient spent their whole commute chatting with a friend — in which case, they’d know who that person was and could give that information to a contact tracer — while risk would be much lower for commuters who are not touching or talking to one another, especially if everyone was wearing a mask.
Dr. Emily Gurley, an associate scientist at Johns Hopkins and instructor of a free online course now required for all tracers hired by the state of New York, noted that the CDC definition of a close contact presumes that people are not wearing masks. (And if you think you’ve got the knowledge to be a contact tracer, try our quiz.)
Still, contact tracing efforts may be hampered by other circumstances, such as when patients are too sick to interview. Then, Gurley said, “you’re trying to understand who their contacts are by talking to their family member — but they’re not going to have been with the patient all day long.”
Other times, patients may not know the names of everyone they came in contact with, such as at a gym or grocery store. In those cases, contact tracers will use whatever pieces of information they can get to track down potential contacts, according to Capt. Eric Pevzner, chief of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service program.
“You might say, ‘I talked to Bob at the grocery store, but I don’t know his last name,’ then I will call the local grocery store and ask, ‘Do you have someone called Bob who works in the produce section?’”
Pevzner recently traveled to Utah to help with contact tracing efforts. (I was surprised to hear that such a high-ranking official would be deployed to do such tedious work, but Pevzner said that the magnitude of the pandemic is so large, even he got sent into the field.)
In Utah, Pevzner made sure to always use a landline, because people wouldn’t pick up if he rang from his cellphone, presuming an out-of-state number was a spam call.
“The hard part right now is that everyone’s days are blending together, because everyone’s at home,” he said. “Normally, I could ask, ‘When did your symptoms start?’ And you might say, ‘Normally I go to spin class on Wednesday night, so it was Wednesday morning at work that I started to feel bad.’ Now, people can’t remember what day it is, so I might ask, ‘What did you watch on TV?’ And I’ll Google the TV show to figure out what day it was.”
Contact Tracing Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect to Work
What happens if a contact slips through the net? Much has been made of South Korea’s meticulous contact tracing abilities, which includes sweeping up citizens’ cellphone and credit card information and publishing digital diaries of positive patients — with information as granular as the seats they sat in at movie theaters and the restaurants they ate at. In Hong Kong, incoming travelers are placed in mandatory quarantine and given wristbands to track their movements to ensure compliance.
We wouldn’t do that in the United States, for both privacy and logistical reasons. Does that mean we’re doomed to contact tracing failure?
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Not so, the experts told me, and there’s preliminary data that can help us estimate the levels of testing and tracing needed.
Let me first note that the following studies are preprints, which are draft research papers shared publicly before being published in an academic journal. While they are yet to be peer reviewed, outside experts not involved in the papers told me they look sound. Both papers testify to the power of contact tracing, when done robustly but not necessarily perfectly.
Researchers in the U.K. used a model to simulate the effects of various mitigation and containment strategies. The researchers estimated that isolating symptomatic cases would reduce transmission by 32%. But combining isolation with manual contact tracing of all contacts reduced transmission by 61%. If contact tracing only could track down acquaintances, but not all contacts, transmission was still reduced by 57%.
A second study, which used a model based on the Boston metropolitan area, found that so long as 50% of symptomatic infections were identified and 40% of their contacts were traced, the ensuing reduction in transmission would be sufficient to allow the reopening of the economy without overloading the health care system. The researchers picked Boston because of the quality of available data, according to senior author Yamir Moreno, a professor at the institute for biocomputation and physics of complex systems at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. “For other locations, these percentages will change, however, the fact that the best intervention is testing, contact tracing and quarantining remains,” he said.
Johns Hopkins’ Gurley reminded me: “This isn’t an all or nothing game — our goal isn’t to get rid of the virus, we missed that boat. Our goal is now to keep numbers low enough that the health care system can handle the cases and that we don’t have any large outbreaks even as we open up.”
Is the United States Doing Contact Tracing?
Contact tracing can only be effective, however, if there are sufficient staff to carry it out. Local health departments have eliminated more than 50,000 jobs over the past decade, said Oscar Alleyne, chief of programs and services for the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “Those positions have not been refilled. They’ve just done more with less.”
It’s only now, in May, that states are starting to build up contact tracing forces. Estimates for how many we will need are staggering.
Wuhan, China, has a population of 11 million. At one point, it employed 9,000 contact tracers, split into 1,800 teams of five people, according to the World Health Organization-China joint mission report. That’s a ratio of 81 contact tracers per 100,000 residents. Massachusetts, which has a population of 7 million, is hiring 1,000 contact tracers, which would be about 14 contact tracers per 100,000 residents. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said the state will recruit up to 20,000 people to do contact tracing work, including librarians and city attorney staff not able to do their current jobs. That would amount to 50 contact tracers per 100,000 residents.
Of course, the number of contact tracers needed doesn’t just depend on population, but also on the size of the outbreak and compliance with physical distancing and other mitigation measures. New Zealand, which has the virus well under control, has only 190 contact tracers for the whole country (a ratio of 4 per 100,000 residents). It’s hard to argue that they need more.
George Washington University’s Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity has created a tool that estimates the contact tracing workforce needs by state, taking into account coronavirus case counts. As of May 7, it estimated that the United States would need about 184,000 contact tracers, or about 56 per 100,000 Americans.
Many states are still in the process of hiring. Georgia began to allow businesses to reopen on April 24, but it only announced plans to increase its contact tracing force from 250 to 1,000 workers on May 12.
New York City will hire 1,000 tracers by June 1, and it plans to hire 5,000 in total, according to NYC Health + Hospitals spokeswoman Karla Griffith. As of May 17, the city had hired “upwards of 50 people pending background checks,” she said.
“We’re still playing catch-up,” Alleyne lamented. “We’re trying to get to a place where we can move forward.”
It’s important to remember that contact tracing doesn’t work in a vacuum. States need to have robust testing capacity; without the ability to find positive cases in the first place, contact tracers can’t do their work. Once cases and contacts are identified, they also need a way to truly isolate themselves, which can be a challenge for people who share bedrooms and bathrooms with family members or roommates. Many states are now considering the use of hotels or other facilities to offer patients and contacts a place to stay if needed. This is why you often hear the phrase, “Test, trace, isolate” — “trace” on its own is not very effective. You need all three working in concert to properly cut off transmission.
And even when we have a robust contacting tracing corps in place, that doesn’t mean all physical distancing can go out the window. The U.K. modeling study assumed each case had 20 to 30 contacts. If we all started going to football games and hanging out in crowded bars, we’d massively increase the number of contacts we each had and could rapidly overwhelm the capabilities of our local health departments. In South Korea, health authorities scrambled to locate and test more than 5,000 people when a 29-year-old man tested positive after visiting five nightclubs in the capital, Seoul. Since then, more than 100 infections have been connected to the cluster — it’s unclear if all are due to this one individual — and the Seoul city government has shut down all bars and nightclubs indefinitely.
Contact Tracing Also Helps Us Learn About the Virus
There’s more to contact tracing than suppressing transmission. Contact tracing is also a great way to gather data, which can help scientists learn about the virus.
Pevzner, of the CDC, was in Utah because he was helping to conduct a household study in which both nasal and blood samples were collected from every member of households where one person had tested positive for the coronavirus. Fourteen days later, samples were collected again. The nasal samples were used to test for an active infection, while the blood samples were used to test for antibodies, an indication of past infections. By using both types of tests, the researchers could see whether there were any family members who previously had been infected without knowing it. By testing twice over two weeks, the researchers also hoped to find out whether home isolation was successful or not, by monitoring whether any new infections developed within the household.
Read More
by Caroline Chen

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I want you to mentally prepare yourself for a phone call that you could receive sometime over the course of this pandemic: in the next few months or year.

Your phone might ring, and when you pick it up, you may hear someone say, “Hi, I’m calling from the health department.” After verifying your identity, the person may say something like, “I’m afraid we have information that you were in close contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus.”

The person calling is what’s known as a contact tracer. As most states begin to lift restrictions on movement and people once more start to eat in restaurants, work in offices and get on public transit, these phone calls will become more frequent. State public health departments are hiring thousands of these workers, and experts are calling for more than 100,000 contact tracers to be deployed across America.

I can only imagine how I would feel if I got a call telling me that I had been in close contact with a COVID-19 patient — shocked, a little scared and possibly a bit in denial. But after spending a week talking to contact tracing experts across the country, and taking an online course as well, I think I’d also feel one more thing: empowered. Here’s why.

Contact Tracing Will Help Us Reopen Safely

Contact tracing is a public health strategy that has been used successfully to combat infectious disease outbreaks across the globe, from the 1930s, when it helped get rampantsyphilis under control in the United States, to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

Fundamentally, contact tracing works by tracking down all the contacts of an infected person and then taking appropriate action to break the chain of transmission. In practice, that action will vary depending on the nature of the disease — obviously, you don’t need someone to self-isolate at home and have groceries delivered to them if a disease can only be transmitted sexually.

The current coronavirus has been particularly tricky to contain because patients can be contagious a few days before they display symptoms, and some infected people may never show symptoms at all. Furthermore, the time between the onset of symptoms from one case to another is estimated to be quite short, around four days. All these characteristics have helped the virus spread rapidly — and that means that tracers have to move very quickly to reach patients and their contacts in order to cut off new branches of infection.

Experts tell me that contact tracing is the key to safely reopening the economy.

“This narrative has emerged that either we lift all our social distancing measures and let the virus burn through the population, or we hunker down at home forever and let the economy collapse, but that is a false choice,” said Dr. Crystal Watson, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and lead author of a white paper on how the United States can scale up its abilities to identify and trace COVID-19 cases.

“We have this tool — contact tracing — and if we spend some effort and funding on actually building up our capacities, we can control transmission, get back to work much more safely and avoid unnecessary loss of thousands of lives.”

When a patient gets a coronavirus test, the lab reports the results back not only to the patient’s doctor, but also to the local health department. A contact tracer is assigned to the case and will call the person to ask about symptoms, to take down information about people the patient has been in close contact with recently, and to help draw up a plan for isolation, which could entail figuring out how to get groceries or medications delivered.

Current guidance by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends patients who test positive isolate themselves until the following three criteria are fulfilled: 10 days have passed since symptoms first appeared, the patient has had three full days with no fever, and other symptoms like cough or shortness of breath are also improving. For close contacts who have been exposed, the CDC recommends a 14-day quarantine after the last date of exposure. (“Isolation” is the term used for confirmed positive patients, “quarantine” is used for exposed contacts; practically speaking, what you need to do is the same — stay away from others.)

A contact will be told when they were exposed, but never who it was that exposed them to the virus; the health department keeps that information anonymous.

Since the isolation period for patients with the disease depends on symptoms, health department staff need to call back regularly to monitor their progression and help determine when they can safely leave home again. They also check in on quarantined contacts, to see if they are developing symptoms and may need to get tested.

How Does Contact Tracing Work?

In theory, the process sounds straightforward, but the details can be daunting. I had many questions, starting with: Who exactly counts as a contact?

For now, I am still working from home and have had no prolonged or close contact with anyone other than my husband. But when New York’s stay-at-home orders end, I wanted to know: If someone in my office got sick, would my whole newsroom have to go into quarantine? What happens if someone has a subway commute — would contact tracing break down?

Public health workers will make decisions on a case by case basis, said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “You don’t want too many people slipping through the cracks, but at the same time, it’s a big ask, since you’re asking people to stay at home for two weeks.”

In my hypothetical scenario, a contact tracer might consider the office’s ventilation system, Plescia said, to help decide if a whole office needed to go into quarantine. (A case study of a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, concluded that currents from an air conditioner likely helped carry the virus from an infected person to two neighboring tables.) Another factor would be how well the patient remembered all of his or her interactions in the two days before symptoms began.

When it comes to public transit, the experts told me that transmission risk would be much higher if a patient spent their whole commute chatting with a friend — in which case, they’d know who that person was and could give that information to a contact tracer — while risk would be much lower for commuters who are not touching or talking to one another, especially if everyone was wearing a mask.

Dr. Emily Gurley, an associate scientist at Johns Hopkins and instructor of a free online course now required for all tracers hired by the state of New York, noted that the CDC definition of a close contact presumes that people are not wearing masks. (And if you think you’ve got the knowledge to be a contact tracer, try our quiz.)

Still, contact tracing efforts may be hampered by other circumstances, such as when patients are too sick to interview. Then, Gurley said, “you’re trying to understand who their contacts are by talking to their family member — but they’re not going to have been with the patient all day long.”

Other times, patients may not know the names of everyone they came in contact with, such as at a gym or grocery store. In those cases, contact tracers will use whatever pieces of information they can get to track down potential contacts, according to Capt. Eric Pevzner, chief of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service program.

“You might say, ‘I talked to Bob at the grocery store, but I don’t know his last name,’ then I will call the local grocery store and ask, ‘Do you have someone called Bob who works in the produce section?’”

Pevzner recently traveled to Utah to help with contact tracing efforts. (I was surprised to hear that such a high-ranking official would be deployed to do such tedious work, but Pevzner said that the magnitude of the pandemic is so large, even he got sent into the field.)

In Utah, Pevzner made sure to always use a landline, because people wouldn’t pick up if he rang from his cellphone, presuming an out-of-state number was a spam call.

“The hard part right now is that everyone’s days are blending together, because everyone’s at home,” he said. “Normally, I could ask, ‘When did your symptoms start?’ And you might say, ‘Normally I go to spin class on Wednesday night, so it was Wednesday morning at work that I started to feel bad.’ Now, people can’t remember what day it is, so I might ask, ‘What did you watch on TV?’ And I’ll Google the TV show to figure out what day it was.”

Contact Tracing Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect to Work

What happens if a contact slips through the net? Much has been made of South Korea’s meticulous contact tracing abilities, which includes sweeping up citizens’ cellphone and credit card information and publishing digital diaries of positive patients — with information as granular as the seats they sat in at movie theaters and the restaurants they ate at. In Hong Kong, incoming travelers are placed in mandatory quarantine and given wristbands to track their movements to ensure compliance.

We wouldn’t do that in the United States, for both privacy and logistical reasons. Does that mean we’re doomed to contact tracing failure?

Not so, the experts told me, and there’s preliminary data that can help us estimate the levels of testing and tracing needed.

Let me first note that the following studies are preprints, which are draft research papers shared publicly before being published in an academic journal. While they are yet to be peer reviewed, outside experts not involved in the papers told me they look sound. Both papers testify to the power of contact tracing, when done robustly but not necessarily perfectly.

Researchers in the U.K. used a model to simulate the effects of various mitigation and containment strategies. The researchers estimated that isolating symptomatic cases would reduce transmission by 32%. But combining isolation with manual contact tracing of all contacts reduced transmission by 61%. If contact tracing only could track down acquaintances, but not all contacts, transmission was still reduced by 57%.

A second study, which used a model based on the Boston metropolitan area, found that so long as 50% of symptomatic infections were identified and 40% of their contacts were traced, the ensuing reduction in transmission would be sufficient to allow the reopening of the economy without overloading the health care system. The researchers picked Boston because of the quality of available data, according to senior author Yamir Moreno, a professor at the institute for biocomputation and physics of complex systems at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. “For other locations, these percentages will change, however, the fact that the best intervention is testing, contact tracing and quarantining remains,” he said.

Johns Hopkins’ Gurley reminded me: “This isn’t an all or nothing game — our goal isn’t to get rid of the virus, we missed that boat. Our goal is now to keep numbers low enough that the health care system can handle the cases and that we don’t have any large outbreaks even as we open up.”

Is the United States Doing Contact Tracing?

Contact tracing can only be effective, however, if there are sufficient staff to carry it out. Local health departments have eliminated more than 50,000 jobs over the past decade, said Oscar Alleyne, chief of programs and services for the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “Those positions have not been refilled. They’ve just done more with less.”

It’s only now, in May, that states are starting to build up contact tracing forces. Estimates for how many we will need are staggering.

Wuhan, China, has a population of 11 million. At one point, it employed 9,000 contact tracers, split into 1,800 teams of five people, according to the World Health Organization-China joint mission report. That’s a ratio of 81 contact tracers per 100,000 residents. Massachusetts, which has a population of 7 million, is hiring 1,000 contact tracers, which would be about 14 contact tracers per 100,000 residents. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said the state will recruit up to 20,000 people to do contact tracing work, including librarians and city attorney staff not able to do their current jobs. That would amount to 50 contact tracers per 100,000 residents.

Of course, the number of contact tracers needed doesn’t just depend on population, but also on the size of the outbreak and compliance with physical distancing and other mitigation measures. New Zealand, which has the virus well under control, has only 190 contact tracers for the whole country (a ratio of 4 per 100,000 residents). It’s hard to argue that they need more.

George Washington University’s Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity has created a tool that estimates the contact tracing workforce needs by state, taking into account coronavirus case counts. As of May 7, it estimated that the United States would need about 184,000 contact tracers, or about 56 per 100,000 Americans.

Many states are still in the process of hiring. Georgia began to allow businesses to reopen on April 24, but it only announced plans to increase its contact tracing force from 250 to 1,000 workers on May 12.

New York City will hire 1,000 tracers by June 1, and it plans to hire 5,000 in total, according to NYC Health + Hospitals spokeswoman Karla Griffith. As of May 17, the city had hired “upwards of 50 people pending background checks,” she said.

“We’re still playing catch-up,” Alleyne lamented. “We’re trying to get to a place where we can move forward.”

It’s important to remember that contact tracing doesn’t work in a vacuum. States need to have robust testing capacity; without the ability to find positive cases in the first place, contact tracers can’t do their work. Once cases and contacts are identified, they also need a way to truly isolate themselves, which can be a challenge for people who share bedrooms and bathrooms with family members or roommates. Many states are now considering the use of hotels or other facilities to offer patients and contacts a place to stay if needed. This is why you often hear the phrase, “Test, trace, isolate” — “trace” on its own is not very effective. You need all three working in concert to properly cut off transmission.

And even when we have a robust contacting tracing corps in place, that doesn’t mean all physical distancing can go out the window. The U.K. modeling study assumed each case had 20 to 30 contacts. If we all started going to football games and hanging out in crowded bars, we’d massively increase the number of contacts we each had and could rapidly overwhelm the capabilities of our local health departments. In South Korea, health authorities scrambled to locate and test more than 5,000 people when a 29-year-old man tested positive after visiting five nightclubs in the capital, Seoul. Since then, more than 100 infections have been connected to the cluster — it’s unclear if all are due to this one individual — and the Seoul city government has shut down all bars and nightclubs indefinitely.

Contact Tracing Also Helps Us Learn About the Virus

There’s more to contact tracing than suppressing transmission. Contact tracing is also a great way to gather data, which can help scientists learn about the virus.

Pevzner, of the CDC, was in Utah because he was helping to conduct a household study in which both nasal and blood samples were collected from every member of households where one person had tested positive for the coronavirus. Fourteen days later, samples were collected again. The nasal samples were used to test for an active infection, while the blood samples were used to test for antibodies, an indication of past infections. By using both types of tests, the researchers could see whether there were any family members who previously had been infected without knowing it. By testing twice over two weeks, the researchers also hoped to find out whether home isolation was successful or not, by monitoring whether any new infections developed within the household.

Read More

ProPublica health care reporter Marshall Allen describes the questions he asks to assess coronavirus misinformation, starting with a viral video that claims the coronavirus is part of a “hidden agenda.”

Dr. Adam Karpati, senior vice president of public health programs at health organization Vital Strategies, said that such studies can also help tease out “patterns of transmission,” whether that is identifying high-risk settings — are homeless shelters or certain types of workplaces particularly vulnerable? — and types of contacts that are more likely to be infected.

One question on many people’s minds is how children are affected by and transmit the coronavirus. Contact tracing studies can help to start answering that question. For example, a study of 391 COVID-19 cases and their 1,286 close contacts in Shenzhen, China, published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, found that young children were as likely to get infected as adults, though the disease was far milder.

The same study found that contacts who lived with the patient or who had traveled with the patient were at higher risk of infection than other close contacts, which included people who had shared a meal or interacted socially. More studies will need to be done to confirm this type of finding — especially in different geographical and societal contexts.

Isn’t There an App for That?

Beyond traditional manual contact tracing, there’s been considerable buzz about the potential use of phone apps for contact tracing, particularly after Apple and Google announced last month that they would work together to create a contact tracing system.

The Apple-Google system uses the Bluetooth antennas in smartphones to record when two people with the same app come close to each other, but it does not log any location data. If one person later tests positive, and records that in the app, a notification will be sent to all users who were close by in recent days, without revealing the identity of the person who had tested positive. Apple and Google are not developing an app but rather a platform — the apps are to be designed by local public health authorities and run on this system.

Many of the experts I spoke to were skeptical about the success of digital contact tracing apps, because a high degree of uptake is necessary for them to be successful.

In a best-case scenario, an app could be a welcome “workforce multiplier,” helping to identify contacts and new cases at a time when speed is critical, said Watson, of Johns Hopkins, but she cautioned that if information about exposure is only shared with app users and doesn’t get shared with public health departments in a manner that allows public health workers to follow up, then utility will be limited.

Even as digital apps continue to be explored, there are other, less flashy technologies that can be helpful to contact tracing efforts. Something as simple as text messages to ask exposed contacts how they’re feeling can reduce the number of daily follow-up calls that a health worker needs to make every day.

“Let’s say you have a mild case, it may be less invasive to just text. But if you’re 75 and you say, ‘I hate texting!’ Someone should call you,” said Gurley, the instructor of the contact tracing course. “Those tech options should be there to help, not replace.”

The Key to Successful Contact Tracing? Trust.

Across all the interviews I did, there was one word that every single person I interviewed said at least once, if not multiple times: trust.

Contact tracing, ultimately, depends on the goodwill of a population. While health departments, in theory, may have some legal authority to enforce isolation of a confirmed COVID-19 patient, it’s highly unlikely in the United States that health departments could enforce a quarantine order for a contact who hasn’t yet developed symptoms, said ASTHO’s Plescia, meaning that success will be down to the voluntary cooperation of the community.

Dr. Raj Panjabi, CEO of nonprofit Last Mile Health, which works to improve access and quality of care in rural and remote communities, told me a story about contact tracing in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak. A woman in her 40s had come down with Ebola and, unable to find treatment in the city, had gone back to her home in the middle of a rainforest to be with her loved ones, where she died. A couple of weeks later, 21 people, including many who had attended her funeral, had contracted the disease.

The Ministry of Health hired people from the community and paired neighbors with nurses to go door to door to conduct interviews. Ultimately, they identified 216 contacts for the 21 cases and managed to halt transmission.

The key, Panjabi said, was “hiring the neighbors of the patients — that builds trust. You’re less likely to give your information to a stranger. You have to have rapport and empathy. It comes when someone sounds like you.”

After the Ebola outbreak, Liberia not only maintained all the health workers it had hired, but it even scaled up to create a national community health workforce of 4,000, which goes door to door providing preventive care for mothers and children, as well as testing and treatment for diseases like malaria, Panjabi said. When the coronavirus pandemic emerged, they were rapidly retrained to look out for COVID-19 cases. As of May 16, the country had reported 219 cases.

“When someone has taken the time to find you in your home village, to tell you important information about your health and to try and help you, that’s pretty compelling and that shows their commitment to you,” Johns Hopkins’ Gurley said.

Contact tracers may not have to come to my door here, in America, but I hope that if I do get called someday and am told that I was exposed to the virus, that after I get over the initial shock, I’ll have the presence of mind to say: “Thank you for all the work you’ve done to bring me this information. I’m happy to stay at home.”

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by Caroline Chenhttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/18/trumps-stunning-claim-that-hes-taking-hydroxychloroquine-could-trigger-cascade-negative-effects/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=wp_politicsTrump’s stunning claim that he’s taking hydroxychloroquine could trigger a cascade of negative effects2020-05-18T14:45:00.000-07:00Speaking to reporters during an event on Monday, President Trump made a surprising pivot away from attacking a whistleblower who had criticized his administration’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic.
The whistleblower, Rick Bright, claimed that he was fired by the White House for criticizing Trump’s endorsement of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. But Trump noted it was Bright himself who — in his official capacity — signed a request to the Food and Drug Administration to provide emergency authorization for the drug’s use to treat the disease.
“Now, if he doesn’t believe in it, why would he sign it? And a lot of good things have come out about the hydroxy. A lot of good things have come out,” Trump said. “You’d be surprised at how many people are taking it, especially the front-line workers, before you catch it. The front-line workers, many, many are taking it.”
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“I happen to be taking it. I happen to be taking it,” Trump then added.
A murmur in the room. He was taking hydroxychloroquine?
“Right now,” Trump claimed. “Couple of weeks ago I started taking it because I think it’s good. I’ve heard a lot of good stories.”
The White House doctor approved his use of the medication, Trump said, noting that it has “been around for 40 years” to treat other illnesses. Asked what evidence he had that the medicine was effective as a preventive, Trump offered a curt response.
“Here we go. You ready? Here’s my evidence,” Trump said. “I get a lot of positive calls about it.”
At another point, he said he had received a letter from a doctor in New York who had treated patients with the medication and who asked that he “keep pressing” the drug.
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“The only negative I’ve heard was the study where they gave it — was it the VA? People that aren’t big Trump fans,” Trump said. He was referring to a report released by the Department of Veterans Affairs that indicated the drug didn’t help in treating covid-19 and, in fact, correlated to higher death rates. This report, he said, was a “very unscientific report” — conflicting with the “tremendously positive news” he gets personally on the drug.
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“You know the expression I’ve used … ? What do you have to lose,” Trump said. “Okay? What do you have to lose?”
All of this, every word, is remarkable in its own way.
The first is that Trump’s focus on hydroxychloroquine has always been anecdotal, spurred by reports from Fox News anchors and their guests or other individuals who claim positive effects from the drug. As The Washington Post has reported, those unscientific assessments conflict with observed effects from the use of the drug in clinical trials, where the effectiveness of it in treating covid-19 has been limited and outweighed by the risk of death the drug poses. (This, of course, is what patients have to lose: their lives.)
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The FDA, after granting the emergency use authorization, formally warned against using the medication to treat covid-19. One former FDA official who spoke to The Post expressed surprise that the agency had not yet revoked that authorization.
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It’s also remarkable that Trump claims to have taken the medicine and that there’s no reason to accept his claim at face value. It seems hard to believe that a practicing physician would give a patient a pass on trying a potent, unproven medication solely on the basis of seeking to prevent a disease. Particularly when that patient is already the focus of a robust protective regimen, including frequent testing of those with whom he associates. And particularly given that the risk posed by hydroxychloroquine centers on its effects on the heart. Trump’s past health reports have shown that he takes medications aimed at heart health, including Crestor — likely aimed at reducing his cholesterol — and aspirin.
It’s worth noting, too, that the FDA doesn’t allow for a use such as the one Trump claims. The emergency use authorization specifies that the drug can be used “to treat adults and teens hospitalized with COVID-19 who weigh more than 50 kg (110 pounds).”
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Of course, Trump’s predilection for making false assertions is well documented. This announcement follows a predictable pattern for Trump of escalating a rhetorical point. Trump wants to disparage Bright, so he claims that hydroxychloroquine is safe and effective. To bolster that point, Trump points to unnamed doctors who he asserts have been prescribing the medication. Then, he escalates the point again: In fact, he himself is taking it, and he’s doing just fine. How can you argue with that? Trump is healthy and covid-free, so how can anyone suggest that the drug is dangerous or ineffective? Sure, the argument is of the anti-tiger-rock variety, but you work with what you’ve got.
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In the moment, it’s an expedient example to cite and, who knows, perhaps an honest one. But one effect of the claim is almost certain: Trump supporters will view the drug as a harmless way to potentially prevent a dangerous illness. Many, presumably, might then seek it out and take it — hopefully without negative side effects. The case of the couple in Arizona who took a fish-tank cleaning substance that was tangentially related to hydroxychloroquine may, in fact, have been a complicated murder plot. But if the president insists that he’s taking a potentially lifesaving medication without any problems, why wouldn’t others try to do the same?
More broadly, this reinforces a central gap in Trump’s approach to the pandemic. While formally embracing the suggestions of medical experts, he has consistently undermined their advice, from pushing for a rapid scaleback of efforts to contain the virus to ignoring the need to wear a mask in public. This is another example of Trump knowing better than the “experts,” a message that resonated with many of his supporters in 2016 but which is far riskier in the present conditions.
AD
In other words, the best-case scenario to Trump’s admission on Monday is that he is, in fact, taking a risky medication with his doctor’s consent for which he’s not seeing repercussions and which his supporters will not see as a green light for seeking it out themselves. The worst-case? Trump claimed to be taking the medication to make a point, inadvertently triggering a new embrace of the medication among those who take his words at face value — putting lives at risk.
AD
Not only the lives of those taking it, mind you. Trump’s past advocacy of the drug led to a shortage among patients who rely on it to treat other illnesses. What’s more, a legion of Americans taking the drug who believe erroneously that it protects them from contracting covid-19 can be relied upon to take risks in their behavior that increase the possibility that the virus might spread to others.
If it is the case that Trump is taking the medication, he could have released that information in a controlled, carefully articulated way, making sure to highlight either the uniqueness of his position and the risks it poses to others. But that’s not what he did. Instead, he quintupled down on past advocacy of the medication using similarly hollow evidence, apparently for little more immediate reason than being more right than his critics.
AD

Speaking to reporters during an event on Monday, President Trump made a surprising pivot away from attacking a whistleblower who had criticized his administration’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic.

The whistleblower, Rick Bright, claimed that he was fired by the White House for criticizing Trump’s endorsement of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. But Trump noted it was Bright himself who — in his official capacity — signed a request to the Food and Drug Administration to provide emergency authorization for the drug’s use to treat the disease.

“Now, if he doesn’t believe in it, why would he sign it? And a lot of good things have come out about the hydroxy. A lot of good things have come out,” Trump said. “You’d be surprised at how many people are taking it, especially the front-line workers, before you catch it. The front-line workers, many, many are taking it.”

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“I happen to be taking it. I happen to be taking it,” Trump then added.

A murmur in the room. He was taking hydroxychloroquine?

“Right now,” Trump claimed. “Couple of weeks ago I started taking it because I think it’s good. I’ve heard a lot of good stories.”

The White House doctor approved his use of the medication, Trump said, noting that it has “been around for 40 years” to treat other illnesses. Asked what evidence he had that the medicine was effective as a preventive, Trump offered a curt response.

“Here we go. You ready? Here’s my evidence,” Trump said. “I get a lot of positive calls about it.”

At another point, he said he had received a letter from a doctor in New York who had treated patients with the medication and who asked that he “keep pressing” the drug.

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“The only negative I’ve heard was the study where they gave it — was it the VA? People that aren’t big Trump fans,” Trump said. He was referring to a report released by the Department of Veterans Affairs that indicated the drug didn’t help in treating covid-19 and, in fact, correlated to higher death rates. This report, he said, was a “very unscientific report” — conflicting with the “tremendously positive news” he gets personally on the drug.

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“You know the expression I’ve used … ? What do you have to lose,” Trump said. “Okay? What do you have to lose?”

All of this, every word, is remarkable in its own way.

The first is that Trump’s focus on hydroxychloroquine has always been anecdotal, spurred by reports from Fox News anchors and their guests or other individuals who claim positive effects from the drug. As The Washington Post has reported, those unscientific assessments conflict with observed effects from the use of the drug in clinical trials, where the effectiveness of it in treating covid-19 has been limited and outweighed by the risk of death the drug poses. (This, of course, is what patients have to lose: their lives.)

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The FDA, after granting the emergency use authorization, formally warned against using the medication to treat covid-19. One former FDA official who spoke to The Post expressed surprise that the agency had not yet revoked that authorization.

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It’s also remarkable that Trump claims to have taken the medicine and that there’s no reason to accept his claim at face value. It seems hard to believe that a practicing physician would give a patient a pass on trying a potent, unproven medication solely on the basis of seeking to prevent a disease. Particularly when that patient is already the focus of a robust protective regimen, including frequent testing of those with whom he associates. And particularly given that the risk posed by hydroxychloroquine centers on its effects on the heart. Trump’s past health reports have shown that he takes medications aimed at heart health, including Crestor — likely aimed at reducing his cholesterol — and aspirin.

It’s worth noting, too, that the FDA doesn’t allow for a use such as the one Trump claims. The emergency use authorization specifies that the drug can be used “to treat adults and teens hospitalized with COVID-19 who weigh more than 50 kg (110 pounds).”

AD

Of course, Trump’s predilection for making false assertions is well documented. This announcement follows a predictable pattern for Trump of escalating a rhetorical point. Trump wants to disparage Bright, so he claims that hydroxychloroquine is safe and effective. To bolster that point, Trump points to unnamed doctors who he asserts have been prescribing the medication. Then, he escalates the point again: In fact, he himself is taking it, and he’s doing just fine. How can you argue with that? Trump is healthy and covid-free, so how can anyone suggest that the drug is dangerous or ineffective? Sure, the argument is of the anti-tiger-rock variety, but you work with what you’ve got.

AD

In the moment, it’s an expedient example to cite and, who knows, perhaps an honest one. But one effect of the claim is almost certain: Trump supporters will view the drug as a harmless way to potentially prevent a dangerous illness. Many, presumably, might then seek it out and take it — hopefully without negative side effects. The case of the couple in Arizona who took a fish-tank cleaning substance that was tangentially related to hydroxychloroquine may, in fact, have been a complicated murder plot. But if the president insists that he’s taking a potentially lifesaving medication without any problems, why wouldn’t others try to do the same?

More broadly, this reinforces a central gap in Trump’s approach to the pandemic. While formally embracing the suggestions of medical experts, he has consistently undermined their advice, from pushing for a rapid scaleback of efforts to contain the virus to ignoring the need to wear a mask in public. This is another example of Trump knowing better than the “experts,” a message that resonated with many of his supporters in 2016 but which is far riskier in the present conditions.

AD

In other words, the best-case scenario to Trump’s admission on Monday is that he is, in fact, taking a risky medication with his doctor’s consent for which he’s not seeing repercussions and which his supporters will not see as a green light for seeking it out themselves. The worst-case? Trump claimed to be taking the medication to make a point, inadvertently triggering a new embrace of the medication among those who take his words at face value — putting lives at risk.

AD

Not only the lives of those taking it, mind you. Trump’s past advocacy of the drug led to a shortage among patients who rely on it to treat other illnesses. What’s more, a legion of Americans taking the drug who believe erroneously that it protects them from contracting covid-19 can be relied upon to take risks in their behavior that increase the possibility that the virus might spread to others.

If it is the case that Trump is taking the medication, he could have released that information in a controlled, carefully articulated way, making sure to highlight either the uniqueness of his position and the risks it poses to others. But that’s not what he did. Instead, he quintupled down on past advocacy of the medication using similarly hollow evidence, apparently for little more immediate reason than being more right than his critics.

AD

]]>
Philip Bumphttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttp://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9499/13547028“Immune to Evidence”: How Dangerous Coronavirus Conspiracies Spread2020-05-17T02:00:00.000-07:00by Marshall Allen
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
Stephan Lewandowsky studies the way people think, and in particular, why they engage in conspiracy theories. So when the cognitive scientist from England’s University of Bristol observes wild speculation related to the COVID-19 pandemic, he sees how it fits into the historical pattern of misinformation and fake news.
I recently wrote about the viral video “Plandemic” as an investigative reporter assessing the range of unsubstantiated COVID-19 allegations put forth by a controversial researcher. Lewandowsky comes at the video and others like it from a science-based perspective. He is one of the authors of “The Conspiracy Theory Handbook,” which explains the traits of conspiratorial thinking.
Help Us Report on Coronavirus
Are you a public health worker, medical provider, elected official, patient or other COVID-19 expert? Help make sure our journalism is responsible and focused on the right issues.
Note: If you develop emergency warning signs for COVID-19, such as difficulty breathing or bluish lips, get medical attention immediately. The CDC has more information on what to do if you are sick.
Conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic seem to be proliferating, and some may even be taking root. So I asked Lewandowsky to share how he identifies and understands them, and what we can do to sort through the confusion. The interview has been condensed for clarity and length.
What’s the difference between a real conspiracy and a conspiracy theory?
A real conspiracy actually exists, and it is usually uncovered by journalists, whistleblowers, document dumps from a corporation or government, or it’s discovered by a government agency. The Volkswagen emissions scandal, for example, was discovered by conventional ways when some engineers discovered an anomaly in a report. It was all mundane — normal people having normal observations based on data. They said, “Hang on, something’s funny here,” and then it unraveled. The same is true for the Iran-contra scandal. That broke via a newspaper in Lebanon. True conspiracies are often uncovered through the media. In Watergate, it was journalists not taking “no” for an answer.
A conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is discussed at length on the internet by people who are not bona fide journalists or government officials or whistleblowers in an organization or investigative committees of regulators. They’re completely independent sources, individuals who self-nominate and put themselves forward as being in possession of the truth. In principle, that could be true. But then if you look at the way these people think and talk and communicate, you discover their cognition is different from what I would call conventional cognition.
What are some differences between conventional and conspiratorial thinking?
You can start with healthy skepticism vs. overriding suspicion. As a scientist, I’m obviously skeptical. I’m questioning anything people say. I look at my own data and other people’s data with a skeptical eye. But after skeptics have been skeptical, they are quite capable of accepting evidence. Once something has withstood scrutiny, you accept it. Otherwise you’re in a state of complete nihilism and you can’t believe anything.
That crucial second step of acceptance is absent in conspiracy theorists. That is where conspiracy theorists are different. Their skepticism is a bottomless, never-ending pit of skepticism about anything related to the official account. And that skepticism is accompanied by extreme gullibility to anything related to the conspiracy. It’s an imbalance between skepticism for anything an official may say and complete gullibility for something some random dude on the internet will tweet out. It’s that imbalance that differentiates conspiracy thinking from standard cognition.
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Conspiracy thinking is immune to evidence. In the “Plandemic” video, the absence of evidence is twisted to be seen to be as evidence for the theory. They say the cover-up is so perfect that you will never find out about it. That’s the opposite of rational thinking. Usually when you think of a hypothesis, you think of the evidence. And if there’s zero evidence, you give it up or say there is no evidence for it.
Conspiracy theorists may also simultaneously believe things that are contradictory. In the “Plandemic” video, for example, they say COVID-19 both came from a Wuhan lab and that we’re all infected with the disease from vaccinations. They’re making both claims, and they don’t hang together.
More generally, conspiracy theorists show this contradictory thinking by presenting themselves as both victims and heroes. They see themselves as these heroes in possession of the truth. But they also see themselves as victims. They feel they are being persecuted by this evil establishment or the deep state or whatever it is.
Why do you think some conspiracy theories are so popular?
Some people find comfort in resorting to a conspiracy theory whenever they have a sense of a loss of control or they’re confronted with a major adverse event that no one has control over. So every time there’s a mass shooting in the U.S., I can guarantee you ahead of time that there will be a conspiracy theory about it.
So you would expect conspiracy theories related to the pandemic. That doesn’t make them any less harmful. Here in the United Kingdom, people are burning 5G cell towers because of this extreme idea that 5G has something to do with causing COVID-19. More than 70 cell towers have gone up in flames because of this conspiracy theory.
Is conspiracy thinking at an all time high?
Historical records show that there were rampant conspiracy theories going on in the Middle Ages when the plague hit Europe. It was anti-Semitism at the time. That tends to be part and parcel of pandemics. People engage in conspiracies that involve some sort of “othering” of people. During previous pandemics, people chased doctors down the street because they thought they were responsible for the pandemic. In Europe, now a lot of antagonism is directed at Asians, because the pandemic started in China. The internet is helping the spread of conspiracy theories. It’s much easier now than it was 30 years ago. But it’s difficult to say we have more now.
Are conservatives or liberals any more likely to engage in conspiracy thinking?
There is a lot of research on this and political conspiracy theories tend to be most associated with extreme political views, on the right or the left. But if you quantify it, you frequently find more on the right than the left.
How do we talk to the conspiracy theorists in our lives?
It’s extremely difficult. In terms of strategy, the best people to talk to are people who are not conspiracy theorists. The vast majority of people are grateful for the debunking and responsive to it. That should be your target of communication if you have a choice. The hardcore conspiracy theorists are unlikely to change their minds. They will take what you say and display considerable ingenuity in twisting it and using it against you. On Twitter, I block them immediately because I’m concerned about my ability to have a rational conversation and I don’t want others to violate that right.
How do we prevent the spread of conspiracy theories?
By trying to inoculate the public against them. Telling the public ahead of time: Look, there are people who believe these conspiracy theories. They invent this stuff. When they invent it they exhibit these characteristics of misguided cognition. You can go through the traits we mention in our handbook, like incoherence, immunity to evidence, overriding suspicion and connecting random dots into a pattern. The best thing to do is tell the public how they can spot conspiracy theories and how they can protect themselves.
Are you aware of any cases where the conspiracy theorists turned out to be right?
There are tens of thousands of conspiracy theories out there, so I haven’t checked them all. But if you look at actual conspiracies, Volkswagen, Iran-contra, Watergate — the real conspiracies — they were uncovered by conventional cognition. There weren’t people there who took the absence of evidence to be evidence for the theory, or who reinterpreted contrary evidence to somehow support their theory. I’m not aware of any conspiracy theorists discovering something where they turn out to be correct.
Tell Us More About Coronavirus
Are you a public health worker, medical provider, elected official, patient or other COVID-19 expert? Help make sure our journalism is responsible and focused on the right issues.
by Marshall Allen

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Stephan Lewandowsky studies the way people think, and in particular, why they engage in conspiracy theories. So when the cognitive scientist from England’s University of Bristol observes wild speculation related to the COVID-19 pandemic, he sees how it fits into the historical pattern of misinformation and fake news.

I recently wrote about the viral video “Plandemic” as an investigative reporter assessing the range of unsubstantiated COVID-19 allegations put forth by a controversial researcher. Lewandowsky comes at the video and others like it from a science-based perspective. He is one of the authors of “The Conspiracy Theory Handbook,” which explains the traits of conspiratorial thinking.

Conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 pandemic seem to be proliferating, and some may even be taking root. So I asked Lewandowsky to share how he identifies and understands them, and what we can do to sort through the confusion. The interview has been condensed for clarity and length.

What’s the difference between a real conspiracy and a conspiracy theory?

A real conspiracy actually exists, and it is usually uncovered by journalists, whistleblowers, document dumps from a corporation or government, or it’s discovered by a government agency. The Volkswagen emissions scandal, for example, was discovered by conventional ways when some engineers discovered an anomaly in a report. It was all mundane — normal people having normal observations based on data. They said, “Hang on, something’s funny here,” and then it unraveled. The same is true for the Iran-contra scandal. That broke via a newspaper in Lebanon. True conspiracies are often uncovered through the media. In Watergate, it was journalists not taking “no” for an answer.

A conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is discussed at length on the internet by people who are not bona fide journalists or government officials or whistleblowers in an organization or investigative committees of regulators. They’re completely independent sources, individuals who self-nominate and put themselves forward as being in possession of the truth. In principle, that could be true. But then if you look at the way these people think and talk and communicate, you discover their cognition is different from what I would call conventional cognition.

What are some differences between conventional and conspiratorial thinking?

You can start with healthy skepticism vs. overriding suspicion. As a scientist, I’m obviously skeptical. I’m questioning anything people say. I look at my own data and other people’s data with a skeptical eye. But after skeptics have been skeptical, they are quite capable of accepting evidence. Once something has withstood scrutiny, you accept it. Otherwise you’re in a state of complete nihilism and you can’t believe anything.

That crucial second step of acceptance is absent in conspiracy theorists. That is where conspiracy theorists are different. Their skepticism is a bottomless, never-ending pit of skepticism about anything related to the official account. And that skepticism is accompanied by extreme gullibility to anything related to the conspiracy. It’s an imbalance between skepticism for anything an official may say and complete gullibility for something some random dude on the internet will tweet out. It’s that imbalance that differentiates conspiracy thinking from standard cognition.

Conspiracy thinking is immune to evidence. In the “Plandemic” video, the absence of evidence is twisted to be seen to be as evidence for the theory. They say the cover-up is so perfect that you will never find out about it. That’s the opposite of rational thinking. Usually when you think of a hypothesis, you think of the evidence. And if there’s zero evidence, you give it up or say there is no evidence for it.

Conspiracy theorists may also simultaneously believe things that are contradictory. In the “Plandemic” video, for example, they say COVID-19 both came from a Wuhan lab and that we’re all infected with the disease from vaccinations. They’re making both claims, and they don’t hang together.

More generally, conspiracy theorists show this contradictory thinking by presenting themselves as both victims and heroes. They see themselves as these heroes in possession of the truth. But they also see themselves as victims. They feel they are being persecuted by this evil establishment or the deep state or whatever it is.

Why do you think some conspiracy theories are so popular?

Some people find comfort in resorting to a conspiracy theory whenever they have a sense of a loss of control or they’re confronted with a major adverse event that no one has control over. So every time there’s a mass shooting in the U.S., I can guarantee you ahead of time that there will be a conspiracy theory about it.

So you would expect conspiracy theories related to the pandemic. That doesn’t make them any less harmful. Here in the United Kingdom, people are burning 5G cell towers because of this extreme idea that 5G has something to do with causing COVID-19. More than 70 cell towers have gone up in flames because of this conspiracy theory.

Is conspiracy thinking at an all time high?

Historical records show that there were rampant conspiracy theories going on in the Middle Ages when the plague hit Europe. It was anti-Semitism at the time. That tends to be part and parcel of pandemics. People engage in conspiracies that involve some sort of “othering” of people. During previous pandemics, people chased doctors down the street because they thought they were responsible for the pandemic. In Europe, now a lot of antagonism is directed at Asians, because the pandemic started in China. The internet is helping the spread of conspiracy theories. It’s much easier now than it was 30 years ago. But it’s difficult to say we have more now.

Are conservatives or liberals any more likely to engage in conspiracy thinking?

There is a lot of research on this and political conspiracy theories tend to be most associated with extreme political views, on the right or the left. But if you quantify it, you frequently find more on the right than the left.

How do we talk to the conspiracy theorists in our lives?

It’s extremely difficult. In terms of strategy, the best people to talk to are people who are not conspiracy theorists. The vast majority of people are grateful for the debunking and responsive to it. That should be your target of communication if you have a choice. The hardcore conspiracy theorists are unlikely to change their minds. They will take what you say and display considerable ingenuity in twisting it and using it against you. On Twitter, I block them immediately because I’m concerned about my ability to have a rational conversation and I don’t want others to violate that right.

How do we prevent the spread of conspiracy theories?

By trying to inoculate the public against them. Telling the public ahead of time: Look, there are people who believe these conspiracy theories. They invent this stuff. When they invent it they exhibit these characteristics of misguided cognition. You can go through the traits we mention in our handbook, like incoherence, immunity to evidence, overriding suspicion and connecting random dots into a pattern. The best thing to do is tell the public how they can spot conspiracy theories and how they can protect themselves.

Are you aware of any cases where the conspiracy theorists turned out to be right?

There are tens of thousands of conspiracy theories out there, so I haven’t checked them all. But if you look at actual conspiracies, Volkswagen, Iran-contra, Watergate — the real conspiracies — they were uncovered by conventional cognition. There weren’t people there who took the absence of evidence to be evidence for the theory, or who reinterpreted contrary evidence to somehow support their theory. I’m not aware of any conspiracy theorists discovering something where they turn out to be correct.

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by Marshall Allenhttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttps://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-05-14/economy-shut-downHiltzik: Shutdown fatigue and lack of coronavirus progress - Los Angeles Times2020-05-14T19:19:06.000-07:00— Permalink
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https://hs.ajy.co/shaarli/?do=rss&searchtags=ajy.coShaarlihttps://www.theverge.com/2020/5/7/21248734/coronavirus-antibody-tests-explained-covid-19-immunity-accurateCoronavirus antibody testing, explained - The Verge2020-05-13T06:35:45.000-07:00— Permalink
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https://hs.ajy.co/shaarli/?do=rss&searchtags=ajy.coShaarlihttps://fivethirtyeight.com/features/without-a-vaccine-herd-immunity-wont-save-us/Without A Vaccine, Herd Immunity Won’t Save Us2020-05-13T02:58:00.000-07:00Daniel Arlein has already had COVID-19. In March, the 36-year-old small business owner and DJ, who lives in Brooklyn, tested positive for the viral infection and suffered through two weeks of flu-like symptoms.
Arlein has since recovered, and while he’s still being careful — avoiding leaving the house, washing his hands more often and wearing a face mask — he can’t help feeling a bit relieved to have already had the infection.
“The only way it’s helping me is psychologically, to be able to go out in the world and still be careful but not be freaked out that I’m going to get sick,” he said. “I have no idea if I will get sick again. I feel like I won’t, but I have no idea if I can get it again.”
Most people understand immunity to mean that once a person has been exposed to a disease, they can’t get it again. It’s an easy concept to grasp, and some people have hoped that widespread immunity could be the way out of this pandemic: If enough of the population becomes immune to the disease, the spread would be stopped, since the virus would run out of new, susceptible targets. The “herd” of immune people would protect everyone.
But getting to herd immunity without a vaccine isn’t as simple as the idea itself. A number of variables can affect when herd immunity is reached — and what it costs to get there — and they vary depending on the disease. How infectious is the disease? How deadly is it? And how long do people stay immune once they’ve gotten it? Adjusting any of these variables can drastically change the outcome of this equation. You can probably sense where this is heading …
We’ve built a very simplified version of how those variables interact. (You’ll see just how simple in the methodology beneath the simulator.) To be clear, this is not about COVID-19 itself — instead, our calculator shows how a theoretical disease we’re calling Fictionitis would play out in a population that has never encountered it before and does nothing to try to stop it.
You’ll notice that each variable plays a role in setting a herd immunity threshold and reaching it.
The more people a person with Fictionitis infects on average, the higher the herd immunity threshold rises, but the faster spread also means that the threshold is reached more quickly. That, of course, can lead to a huge portion of the population getting ill at once, which would overwhelm hospitals. Unless the death rate is extremely low, that would be a devastating mix. A disease that doesn’t spread as readily will stick around for longer, but it helps maintain a flatter curve.
If you shortened the immunity duration, you may have also seen that the blue bar showing how much of the population is susceptible rose again even after the herd immunity threshold had been crossed. That’s because if immunity fades while the disease is still active, people who were previously immune once again become at risk for infection. Herd immunity only truly works while the recovered population has immunity to the disease.
For COVID-19, of course, we can’t change these variables, and we still haven’t nailed down their exact values, anyway. What we do know so far paints a stark picture: This disease is too deadly, too contagious and too new to depend on post-infection immunity (as opposed to immunity via vaccination) as a solution. Naturally acquired herd immunity is not the answer.
What is herd immunity?
If everyone in a population is immune to the infection, it can’t spread. But we can prevent a disease’s spread even without everyone being immune. If enough people are immune, the infection is unlikely to spread to big swaths of vulnerable people because those who are immune, the “herd,” protect them. The more people who are immune, the more likely it is that infectious people will only come into contact with people who cannot be infected, ending the spread. This creates a societal barrier between the infectious and the vulnerable.
The moment when herd immunity kicks in depends on how contagious the pathogen is, which is measured by what experts call the basic reproduction number, or R0 (pronounced “R naught”). The R0 is simply the average number of people an infectious person will spread the disease to in a population where no one is immune, so an R0 of 3 would mean an infected person spreads the disease to, on average, three other people while they’re contagious.5
The higher the R0, the higher the proportion of the population that needs to be immune to stop its spread. This is known as the herd immunity threshold, and the formula for finding it is actually pretty straightforward: 1 – 1/R0.6 For a really contagious disease like measles, which has an R0 between 12 and 18, 93 to 95 percent of the population needs to be immune to stop the spread (this is why the U.S. has had recent measles outbreaks when vaccination rates dropped even slightly).
“The higher the proportion in a population that is infected, the fewer places there are for that virus to go, the fewer people are susceptible to being transmitted,” said Greta Bauer, an epidemiologist and biostatistician at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “That makes sense, right? If one person, on average, infects two other people but half the population is immune, they’re only going to be able to infect one other person.”
For COVID-19, we’re still not certain what the R0 is, so we don’t yet know what the herd immunity threshold is. For now, it’s estimated to be anywhere from 70 to 90 percent. But here’s the problem: To reach even the lower end of that range naturally in the U.S. — imagine giving up on any interventions and just letting the disease run its course — 230 million Americans would eventually become infected and, depending on the fatality rate (more on that later), millions could die.
And reaching herd immunity as the outbreak is raging is a completely different scenario than, for example, doing so after a vaccine has been created. With a vaccine, you can immunize people before they’ve encountered the virus, so by the time the virus gets to a vaccinated population, it has nowhere to spread. But in an active outbreak, even once the herd immunity threshold is reached, the infection keeps going. It takes time for the spread of the disease to crest because, for a while at least, many contagious people will each still infect a small number of vulnerable people, which means even more people will get sick and die. It’s a phenomenon known as “overshoot.”
“The disease sort of stops increasing at the point when you reach herd immunity, but there’s still lots and lots of people infected. It only slowly goes down, and on its way down, [it] infects another third of the population,” said Richard Neher, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. “If you drive a car and suddenly you switch off the engine, it doesn’t stop instantly.”
So think of crossing the herd immunity threshold as determining the fate of the disease (it’s now bound to die out) rather than its status (it’s dead).
Since the new coronavirus is highly contagious (meaning a large percentage of the population would have to get it to slow its spread), the human toll of reaching herd immunity without a vaccine would be staggering. And that’s assuming that once a person gets sick, they stay immune for a long time. But at this point, we don’t know if that’s the case.
How long are we immune once we’ve had it?
To reach that herd immunity threshold we either need a vaccine, or we need a lot of people like Arlein who have had the virus and are now immune. Except we don’t actually know if Arlein, or anyone else, is really immune.
Typically, when we encounter a new pathogen, our immune system mounts a defense that includes producing antibodies to fight off the infection. Afterward, some of those antibodies and immune cells hang around, allowing our body to “remember” the offending microbe and more easily fend it off in the future.
“The vast majority of anything that you or I have been infected with in our lives, our immune system has developed immunity to and remembers,” said Shane Crotty, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California. “There are definitely exceptions, but that’s the norm.”
Those exceptions are why experts, including the World Health Organization, can’t presume that having had COVID-19 means you can’t get it again, even though antibodies have been detected in recovered patients.
“The presence of antibodies, everybody thinks that means immunity, but I study HIV and there’s a huge antibody response to HIV, and it’s never able to neutralize that virus,” Bauer said.
Researchers have begun trying to find out how much protection COVID-19 antibodies give people who’ve recovered from the disease. There’s a chance that the immune response from COVID-19 is enough to prevent someone from getting sick again, but not necessarily from getting infected, which means they could still be contagious to others, according to Crotty.
It’s likely COVID-19 confers at least some immunity, though. For one, there are no confirmed cases of someone getting COVID-19 twice. Early reports from South Korea drew a lot of attention after patients tested positive for the virus again weeks after having recovered, but researchers later said that dead virus fragments from the original infection likely triggered the positive tests, rather than a second infection. One early study from China — which has not yet been peer reviewed, so take it with an extra grain of salt — also measured neutralizing antibodies in 94 percent of patients.
Previous research done on similar coronaviruses, like the ones that cause SARS and MERS, also offers some promising signs. In a mouse study testing a SARS vaccine, for example, researchers stimulated an immune response that staved off a dose of the virus.
But why would we fail to become immune to a disease? There are a few things that could be happening. Our bodies could stop short of completely killing off the virus in the first place, allowing it to lie dormant and reemerge later (that’s the case with HIV). The virus could evolve enough that our old antibodies won’t work anymore, whether we got them from natural exposure or a vaccine (this is what the seasonal flu does, and it’s part of why we need a new vaccine every year). Or the immune response we produce could just fade too quickly, making us susceptible to reinfection almost immediately.
With the new coronavirus, there’s not much evidence that either of the first two scenarios is in play, but the third possibility — that our immunity fades quickly — remains an open question, and one we won’t be able to answer until more time has passed. Coronaviruses also cause common colds, after all, and humans seem perpetually susceptible to those. In one oft-cited study, for example, people were given a dose of a cold-causing coronavirus, got sick and recovered, then were given another dose a year later. Most of the patients got reinfected, showing how quickly their immunity waned. (And most of them didn’t get sick, which opens up a whole new barrel of fun: If COVID-19 works the same way, some people who had the disease and recovered could wind up picking up — and spreading — the novel coronavirus again despite not being symptomatic.)
“One reason is because your immune system just doesn’t remember all things equally, and to some extent that memory is tied to how severe the initial infection was,” Crotty said.
That said, for SARS and MERS, both of which were also caused by coronaviruses, immune memory cells were detected in patients several years after infection, though because those outbreaks have ended, we don’t know if those immune cells would protect against reinfection.
The only way to know if COVID-19 immunity lasts for, say, 10 years is to wait until a decade has passed and see if anyone who was infected once ever got reinfected. (We’re just full of good news, aren’t we?)
Who’s had it?
Even if it turns out that infected people become immune for some period of time, we still aren’t close to herd immunity solving our COVID-19 problem for us. So few people have had the disease that we’re nowhere near herd immunity yet, and the fatality rate is so high that closing that gap would be devastating.
Eventually, reliable serological tests, which detect antibodies, can be administered to large samples of the population. That will give us a better sense of how many people actually had the infection, and thus the disease’s true fatality rate. There was some hope that these serological surveys would reveal the disease was much more widespread — and therefore way less deadly — than we thought. If, for example, you have 50 deaths in a community and 1,000 recorded cases, the fatality rate is 5 percent (50 out of 1,000). But if a serological survey of that community later revealed that there were actually 3,000 cases, that fatality rate drops to 1.7 percent.
Unfortunately, early serological surveys suggest the fatality rate isn’t low enough to offer us much comfort.
In the U.S., there have been 81,507 deaths as of May 12.7 For a fatality rate of 0.1, the same as the seasonal flu, we’d have to find out that 81.5 million Americans, or nearly a quarter of the U.S. population, had already had COVID-19. But based on early serological surveys, the World Health Organization says it’s likely that only about 2 to 3 percent of the population has been exposed so far.
Some serological surveys have reported wildly different estimates of how many people may be immune. A recent survey in California, for example, found that something like 2 to 4 percent of the population had antibodies, while studies in Germany and Massachusetts found antibodies in 15 to 30 percent of those tested.
One reason for these huge variations could be that rates are genuinely higher in hotspots. Indeed, in New York, the hardest-hit city on the planet, as much as 21 percent of the population may have already been exposed, according to preliminary results from a serological survey. But if even in New York, less than a quarter of the population has antibodies, it’s pretty unlikely that levels are nearly that high in the rest of the country. And New York has also seen a huge number of deaths: at least more than 19,563 as of May 12. Even if this early estimate is correct and 21 percent of New York’s 8.4 million residents have already been infected, that comes out to 1.8 million people, which still puts the current fatality rate at 1.1 percent, or more than 10 times that of the seasonal flu.
“Looking at what percentage of the population might actually have been infected, the numbers of the cases are much higher and the case fatality rate looks like it might be around half a percent,” said Jeremy Rossman, a virologist at the University of Kent. “People say, ‘Oh that’s a trivial number, it’s minuscule.’ But, when you think about, say, the population of the United States, 0.5 percent is a tremendous number, and these are people’s lives.”
The other potential explanation for why those serology survey results are all over the map is there may be problems with the way they were conducted. None of the papers mentioned above have been published in peer-reviewed journals yet, and many experts have raised concerns about false positives and how people were recruited for studies, suggesting even these low levels might be overestimating the true prevalence of the disease.
So let’s go back to that 70 percent herd immunity threshold. If the fatality rate is around 0.5 and 70 percent of Americans have to get sick before their immunity starts protecting others, that means more than 1.1 million people would die. In New York, even having 21 percent of the population exposed, if that serological survey is accurate, has overrun hospitals and led to the death of one in every 400 New Yorkers, while the vast majority of the population remains susceptible.
“That’s the cost of getting to 20 percent,” said Emma Hodcroft, a postdoctoral epidemiology researcher at the University of Basel in Switzerland. “It really illustrates the price you’re going to pay if you want to get up to the 60 percent or 70 percent that you’ll need for herd immunity, and I hope it really illustrates why that just isn’t a feasible plan.”
Daniel Arlein has already had COVID-19. In March, the 36-year-old small business owner and DJ, who lives in Brooklyn, tested positive for the viral infection and suffered through two weeks of flu-like symptoms.

Arlein has since recovered, and while he’s still being careful — avoiding leaving the house, washing his hands more often and wearing a face mask — he can’t help feeling a bit relieved to have already had the infection.

“The only way it’s helping me is psychologically, to be able to go out in the world and still be careful but not be freaked out that I’m going to get sick,” he said. “I have no idea if I will get sick again. I feel like I won’t, but I have no idea if I can get it again.”

Most people understand immunity to mean that once a person has been exposed to a disease, they can’t get it again. It’s an easy concept to grasp, and some people have hoped that widespread immunity could be the way out of this pandemic: If enough of the population becomes immune to the disease, the spread would be stopped, since the virus would run out of new, susceptible targets. The “herd” of immune people would protect everyone.

But getting to herd immunity without a vaccine isn’t as simple as the idea itself. A number of variables can affect when herd immunity is reached — and what it costs to get there — and they vary depending on the disease. How infectious is the disease? How deadly is it? And how long do people stay immune once they’ve gotten it? Adjusting any of these variables can drastically change the outcome of this equation. You can probably sense where this is heading …

We’ve built a very simplified version of how those variables interact. (You’ll see just how simple in the methodology beneath the simulator.) To be clear, this is not about COVID-19 itself — instead, our calculator shows how a theoretical disease we’re calling Fictionitis would play out in a population that has never encountered it before and does nothing to try to stop it.

You’ll notice that each variable plays a role in setting a herd immunity threshold and reaching it.

The more people a person with Fictionitis infects on average, the higher the herd immunity threshold rises, but the faster spread also means that the threshold is reached more quickly. That, of course, can lead to a huge portion of the population getting ill at once, which would overwhelm hospitals. Unless the death rate is extremely low, that would be a devastating mix. A disease that doesn’t spread as readily will stick around for longer, but it helps maintain a flatter curve.

If you shortened the immunity duration, you may have also seen that the blue bar showing how much of the population is susceptible rose again even after the herd immunity threshold had been crossed. That’s because if immunity fades while the disease is still active, people who were previously immune once again become at risk for infection. Herd immunity only truly works while the recovered population has immunity to the disease.

For COVID-19, of course, we can’t change these variables, and we still haven’t nailed down their exact values, anyway. What we do know so far paints a stark picture: This disease is too deadly, too contagious and too new to depend on post-infection immunity (as opposed to immunity via vaccination) as a solution. Naturally acquired herd immunity is not the answer.

What is herd immunity?

If everyone in a population is immune to the infection, it can’t spread. But we can prevent a disease’s spread even without everyone being immune. If enough people are immune, the infection is unlikely to spread to big swaths of vulnerable people because those who are immune, the “herd,” protect them. The more people who are immune, the more likely it is that infectious people will only come into contact with people who cannot be infected, ending the spread. This creates a societal barrier between the infectious and the vulnerable.

The moment when herd immunity kicks in depends on how contagious the pathogen is, which is measured by what experts call the basic reproduction number, or R0 (pronounced “R naught”). The R0 is simply the average number of people an infectious person will spread the disease to in a population where no one is immune, so an R0 of 3 would mean an infected person spreads the disease to, on average, three other people while they’re contagious.5

The higher the R0, the higher the proportion of the population that needs to be immune to stop its spread. This is known as the herd immunity threshold, and the formula for finding it is actually pretty straightforward: 1 – 1/R0.6 For a really contagious disease like measles, which has an R0 between 12 and 18, 93 to 95 percent of the population needs to be immune to stop the spread (this is why the U.S. has had recent measles outbreaks when vaccination rates dropped even slightly).

“The higher the proportion in a population that is infected, the fewer places there are for that virus to go, the fewer people are susceptible to being transmitted,” said Greta Bauer, an epidemiologist and biostatistician at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “That makes sense, right? If one person, on average, infects two other people but half the population is immune, they’re only going to be able to infect one other person.”

For COVID-19, we’re still not certain what the R0 is, so we don’t yet know what the herd immunity threshold is. For now, it’s estimated to be anywhere from 70 to 90 percent. But here’s the problem: To reach even the lower end of that range naturally in the U.S. — imagine giving up on any interventions and just letting the disease run its course — 230 million Americans would eventually become infected and, depending on the fatality rate (more on that later), millions could die.

And reaching herd immunity as the outbreak is raging is a completely different scenario than, for example, doing so after a vaccine has been created. With a vaccine, you can immunize people before they’ve encountered the virus, so by the time the virus gets to a vaccinated population, it has nowhere to spread. But in an active outbreak, even once the herd immunity threshold is reached, the infection keeps going. It takes time for the spread of the disease to crest because, for a while at least, many contagious people will each still infect a small number of vulnerable people, which means even more people will get sick and die. It’s a phenomenon known as “overshoot.”

“The disease sort of stops increasing at the point when you reach herd immunity, but there’s still lots and lots of people infected. It only slowly goes down, and on its way down, [it] infects another third of the population,” said Richard Neher, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. “If you drive a car and suddenly you switch off the engine, it doesn’t stop instantly.”

So think of crossing the herd immunity threshold as determining the fate of the disease (it’s now bound to die out) rather than its status (it’s dead).

Since the new coronavirus is highly contagious (meaning a large percentage of the population would have to get it to slow its spread), the human toll of reaching herd immunity without a vaccine would be staggering. And that’s assuming that once a person gets sick, they stay immune for a long time. But at this point, we don’t know if that’s the case.

How long are we immune once we’ve had it?

To reach that herd immunity threshold we either need a vaccine, or we need a lot of people like Arlein who have had the virus and are now immune. Except we don’t actually know if Arlein, or anyone else, is really immune.

Typically, when we encounter a new pathogen, our immune system mounts a defense that includes producing antibodies to fight off the infection. Afterward, some of those antibodies and immune cells hang around, allowing our body to “remember” the offending microbe and more easily fend it off in the future.

“The vast majority of anything that you or I have been infected with in our lives, our immune system has developed immunity to and remembers,” said Shane Crotty, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California. “There are definitely exceptions, but that’s the norm.”

Those exceptions are why experts, including the World Health Organization, can’t presume that having had COVID-19 means you can’t get it again, even though antibodies have been detected in recovered patients.

“The presence of antibodies, everybody thinks that means immunity, but I study HIV and there’s a huge antibody response to HIV, and it’s never able to neutralize that virus,” Bauer said.

Researchers have begun trying to find out how much protection COVID-19 antibodies give people who’ve recovered from the disease. There’s a chance that the immune response from COVID-19 is enough to prevent someone from getting sick again, but not necessarily from getting infected, which means they could still be contagious to others, according to Crotty.

It’s likely COVID-19 confers at least some immunity, though. For one, there are no confirmed cases of someone getting COVID-19 twice. Early reports from South Korea drew a lot of attention after patients tested positive for the virus again weeks after having recovered, but researchers later said that dead virus fragments from the original infection likely triggered the positive tests, rather than a second infection. One early study from China — which has not yet been peer reviewed, so take it with an extra grain of salt — also measured neutralizing antibodies in 94 percent of patients.

Previous research done on similar coronaviruses, like the ones that cause SARS and MERS, also offers some promising signs. In a mouse study testing a SARS vaccine, for example, researchers stimulated an immune response that staved off a dose of the virus.

But why would we fail to become immune to a disease? There are a few things that could be happening. Our bodies could stop short of completely killing off the virus in the first place, allowing it to lie dormant and reemerge later (that’s the case with HIV). The virus could evolve enough that our old antibodies won’t work anymore, whether we got them from natural exposure or a vaccine (this is what the seasonal flu does, and it’s part of why we need a new vaccine every year). Or the immune response we produce could just fade too quickly, making us susceptible to reinfection almost immediately.

With the new coronavirus, there’s not much evidence that either of the first two scenarios is in play, but the third possibility — that our immunity fades quickly — remains an open question, and one we won’t be able to answer until more time has passed. Coronaviruses also cause common colds, after all, and humans seem perpetually susceptible to those. In one oft-cited study, for example, people were given a dose of a cold-causing coronavirus, got sick and recovered, then were given another dose a year later. Most of the patients got reinfected, showing how quickly their immunity waned. (And most of them didn’t get sick, which opens up a whole new barrel of fun: If COVID-19 works the same way, some people who had the disease and recovered could wind up picking up — and spreading — the novel coronavirus again despite not being symptomatic.)

“One reason is because your immune system just doesn’t remember all things equally, and to some extent that memory is tied to how severe the initial infection was,” Crotty said.

That said, for SARS and MERS, both of which were also caused by coronaviruses, immune memory cells were detected in patients several years after infection, though because those outbreaks have ended, we don’t know if those immune cells would protect against reinfection.

The only way to know if COVID-19 immunity lasts for, say, 10 years is to wait until a decade has passed and see if anyone who was infected once ever got reinfected. (We’re just full of good news, aren’t we?)

Who’s had it?

Even if it turns out that infected people become immune for some period of time, we still aren’t close to herd immunity solving our COVID-19 problem for us. So few people have had the disease that we’re nowhere near herd immunity yet, and the fatality rate is so high that closing that gap would be devastating.

Eventually, reliable serological tests, which detect antibodies, can be administered to large samples of the population. That will give us a better sense of how many people actually had the infection, and thus the disease’s true fatality rate. There was some hope that these serological surveys would reveal the disease was much more widespread — and therefore way less deadly — than we thought. If, for example, you have 50 deaths in a community and 1,000 recorded cases, the fatality rate is 5 percent (50 out of 1,000). But if a serological survey of that community later revealed that there were actually 3,000 cases, that fatality rate drops to 1.7 percent.

Unfortunately, early serological surveys suggest the fatality rate isn’t low enough to offer us much comfort.

In the U.S., there have been 81,507 deaths as of May 12.7 For a fatality rate of 0.1, the same as the seasonal flu, we’d have to find out that 81.5 million Americans, or nearly a quarter of the U.S. population, had already had COVID-19. But based on early serological surveys, the World Health Organization says it’s likely that only about 2 to 3 percent of the population has been exposed so far.

Some serological surveys have reported wildly different estimates of how many people may be immune. A recent survey in California, for example, found that something like 2 to 4 percent of the population had antibodies, while studies in Germany and Massachusetts found antibodies in 15 to 30 percent of those tested.

One reason for these huge variations could be that rates are genuinely higher in hotspots. Indeed, in New York, the hardest-hit city on the planet, as much as 21 percent of the population may have already been exposed, according to preliminary results from a serological survey. But if even in New York, less than a quarter of the population has antibodies, it’s pretty unlikely that levels are nearly that high in the rest of the country. And New York has also seen a huge number of deaths: at least more than 19,563 as of May 12. Even if this early estimate is correct and 21 percent of New York’s 8.4 million residents have already been infected, that comes out to 1.8 million people, which still puts the current fatality rate at 1.1 percent, or more than 10 times that of the seasonal flu.

“Looking at what percentage of the population might actually have been infected, the numbers of the cases are much higher and the case fatality rate looks like it might be around half a percent,” said Jeremy Rossman, a virologist at the University of Kent. “People say, ‘Oh that’s a trivial number, it’s minuscule.’ But, when you think about, say, the population of the United States, 0.5 percent is a tremendous number, and these are people’s lives.”

The other potential explanation for why those serology survey results are all over the map is there may be problems with the way they were conducted. None of the papers mentioned above have been published in peer-reviewed journals yet, and many experts have raised concerns about false positives and how people were recruited for studies, suggesting even these low levels might be overestimating the true prevalence of the disease.

So let’s go back to that 70 percent herd immunity threshold. If the fatality rate is around 0.5 and 70 percent of Americans have to get sick before their immunity starts protecting others, that means more than 1.1 million people would die. In New York, even having 21 percent of the population exposed, if that serological survey is accurate, has overrun hospitals and led to the death of one in every 400 New Yorkers, while the vast majority of the population remains susceptible.

“That’s the cost of getting to 20 percent,” said Emma Hodcroft, a postdoctoral epidemiology researcher at the University of Basel in Switzerland. “It really illustrates the price you’re going to pay if you want to get up to the 60 percent or 70 percent that you’ll need for herd immunity, and I hope it really illustrates why that just isn’t a feasible plan.”

]]>
Kaleigh Rogershttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/11/how-misinformation-filtered-through-fox-news-conservative-media-became-trump-administration-policy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=wp_politicsHow misinformation, filtered through Fox News and conservative media, became Trump administration policy2020-05-11T12:11:00.000-07:00Peter Daszak is a British-born American PhD who’s spent a career discovering dangerous viruses in wildlife, especially bats. In 2003, he warned 60 Minutes a pandemic was coming. Two weeks ago, NIH funding for his virology research was killed. https://t.co/dnEmFCF1MI pic.twitter.com/pKnnffNNOH— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) May 10, 2020
“60 Minutes” did an investigative story Sunday night on the fate of the EcoHealth Alliance. EcoHealth is a nonprofit that does research on pandemics like the coronavirus, and its funding was stripped by the Trump administration last month — stripped after a series of overcooked claims about U.S. taxpayer dollars going to a lab in Wuhan, China.
Even the TV news magazine’s presentation of how that came to be, though, glosses over just how swiftly — and unquestioningly — the misinformation became policy.
At issue is $3.7 million in funding the National Institutes of Health awarded in 2014 to EcoHealth, which conducts research on the sources of pandemics like the coronavirus. One of the foreign partners it works with is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some have theorized might have accidentally leaked the virus — and which further-flung conspiracy theories suggest might have deliberately manufactured it. The funding was even earmarked specifically for studying bats, which are believed to be the source of this particular coronavirus.
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The funding first became an issue on April 11, when the Daily Mail reported that documents it had obtained “show the Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan — funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government.”
While the story tosses out a number of unsubstantiated theories about the role the Wuhan lab might have played in the coronavirus outbreak, one word that curiously doesn’t appear in the story is “EcoHealth,” the name of the company to whom the grant was actually awarded. Nor does the story dwell upon the fact that the vast majority of the $3.7 million went to other projects not involving the Wuhan lab. In fact, only about 15 percent of it did.
These particulars would prove elusive in conservative media in the days to come — and would get little airing before President Trump would announce, just six days later, that the funding would be terminated.
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Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered a brief and strictly accurate summary of the grant on April 13, while citing “quite a bit of evidence quickly accumulating” that the coronavirus originated somewhere besides a Wuhan wet market.
“The Wuhan Institute of Virology is another contender for that,” Carlson said. “Now, new reporting reveals that the lab’s research on bats was funded in part from a $3.7 million grant from the U.S. government. Heard anything more perverse than that today? Probably not.”
But the next day, when Carlson and a Fox colleague went more in-depth on the story, things got more loosey-goosey.
“Despite those warnings,” Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said the next day, “the U.S. National Institutes of Health awarded a nearly $4 million grant to the Wuhan lab studying the virus. What were they thinking?”
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Again, the grant wasn’t to the lab; it was to EcoHealth. And the “nearly $4 million” didn’t all go to research at the lab, but instead the vast majority went to projects in other countries.
The same day, Carlson welcomed Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who repeated the incorrect claim that the $3.7 million went to the Wuhan lab.
“The NIH gives this $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Gaetz said. “They then advertise that they need coronavirus researchers. Following that coronavirus erupts in Wuhan.”
Gaetz added that “what should really trouble viewers is that this is an active grant. This isn’t something of yesteryear. And so I’ve called on [Health and Human Services} Secretary [Alex] Azar to immediately halt this grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
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The premise that the full grant went directly to the Wuhan lab was soon brought up by another conservative media outlet — Newsmax — but this time in a question to Trump at a White House coronavirus task force briefing. And it, too, suggested the grant be halted.
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“There’s also another report that the NIH, under the Obama administration, in 2015 gave that lab $3.7 million in a grant,” the Newsmax reporter said on April 17. “Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?”
The reason is because it didn’t — at least not the full amount and not directly. But this didn’t stop Trump from swiftly saying he would terminate the funding.
Trump at first didn’t seem familiar with the situation. “The Obama administration gave them a grant of $3.7 million? I’ve been hearing about that,” Trump said. Then he quickly indicated not just that he’d been hearing about it, but that there were discussions underway and he had reached a decision.
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“And we’ve instructed that if any grants are going to that area — we’re looking at it, literally, about an hour ago, and also early in the morning,” Trump said. “We will end that grant very quickly. But it was granted quite a while ago."
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Indeed, it wasn’t until shortly after the briefing that more accurate numbers began to filter out among prominent conservatives, with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) tweeting that he had just confirmed $76,000 in fiscal year 2019 went to the Wuhan lab.
BREAKING NEWS: Today @NIH confirmed to me 76,000 US taxpayer dollars in FY2019 went to one of the Chinese virology labs in Wuhan at the center of the #CoronavirusOutbreak.— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 18, 2020
Despite that, at the next day’s briefing Trump repeated the false claim that the $3.7 million had gone to the Wuhan Institute.
“We also talked about the lab in China where, I guess, $3.7 million was given some time ago,” Trump said. “And we’re looking at that very closely.”
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A week later, EcoHealth said its funding had indeed been cut — and not just the portion of the funding that involved research at the Wuhan Institute, but all of it.
And still, the misinformation thrived. While lawmakers wrote letters calling for no further funding involving the lab correctly said it was only part of the $3.7 million, the Washington Times falsely reported on April 22 that, “The National Institutes of Health issued a $3.7 million grant to pay for coronavirus research at Wuhan in 2015, despite safety warnings from the State Department.”
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Trump ally Rudolph W. Giuliani would also claim on April 26 that the awarding of the grant came despite a prohibition on the type of research done in Wuhan. “Back in 2014, the Obama administration prohibited the U.S. from giving money to any laboratory, including in the U.S., that was fooling around with these viruses,” Giuliani said. “Prohibited! Despite that, Dr. [Anthony S.] Fauci gave $3.7 million to the Wuhan laboratory.”
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Blaming Fauci personally for the grant is one thing, but the type of research involved was not prohibited. While there was a prohibition on research involving potentially deadly biological agents, this did not apply to “naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses” unless the research could increase the dangers involved.

Peter Daszak is a British-born American PhD who’s spent a career discovering dangerous viruses in wildlife, especially bats. In 2003, he warned 60 Minutes a pandemic was coming. Two weeks ago, NIH funding for his virology research was killed. https://t.co/dnEmFCF1MIpic.twitter.com/pKnnffNNOH

“60 Minutes” did an investigative story Sunday night on the fate of the EcoHealth Alliance. EcoHealth is a nonprofit that does research on pandemics like the coronavirus, and its funding was stripped by the Trump administration last month — stripped after a series of overcooked claims about U.S. taxpayer dollars going to a lab in Wuhan, China.

Even the TV news magazine’s presentation of how that came to be, though, glosses over just how swiftly — and unquestioningly — the misinformation became policy.

At issue is $3.7 million in funding the National Institutes of Health awarded in 2014 to EcoHealth, which conducts research on the sources of pandemics like the coronavirus. One of the foreign partners it works with is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some have theorized might have accidentally leaked the virus — and which further-flung conspiracy theories suggest might have deliberately manufactured it. The funding was even earmarked specifically for studying bats, which are believed to be the source of this particular coronavirus.

AD

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The funding first became an issue on April 11, when the Daily Mail reported that documents it had obtained “show the Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan — funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government.”

While the story tosses out a number of unsubstantiated theories about the role the Wuhan lab might have played in the coronavirus outbreak, one word that curiously doesn’t appear in the story is “EcoHealth,” the name of the company to whom the grant was actually awarded. Nor does the story dwell upon the fact that the vast majority of the $3.7 million went to other projects not involving the Wuhan lab. In fact, only about 15 percent of it did.

These particulars would prove elusive in conservative media in the days to come — and would get little airing before President Trump would announce, just six days later, that the funding would be terminated.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered a brief and strictly accurate summary of the grant on April 13, while citing “quite a bit of evidence quickly accumulating” that the coronavirus originated somewhere besides a Wuhan wet market.

“The Wuhan Institute of Virology is another contender for that,” Carlson said. “Now, new reporting reveals that the lab’s research on bats was funded in part from a $3.7 million grant from the U.S. government. Heard anything more perverse than that today? Probably not.”

But the next day, when Carlson and a Fox colleague went more in-depth on the story, things got more loosey-goosey.

“Despite those warnings,” Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said the next day, “the U.S. National Institutes of Health awarded a nearly $4 million grant to the Wuhan lab studying the virus. What were they thinking?”

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Again, the grant wasn’t to the lab; it was to EcoHealth. And the “nearly $4 million” didn’t all go to research at the lab, but instead the vast majority went to projects in other countries.

The same day, Carlson welcomed Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who repeated the incorrect claim that the $3.7 million went to the Wuhan lab.

“The NIH gives this $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Gaetz said. “They then advertise that they need coronavirus researchers. Following that coronavirus erupts in Wuhan.”

Gaetz added that “what should really trouble viewers is that this is an active grant. This isn’t something of yesteryear. And so I’ve called on [Health and Human Services} Secretary [Alex] Azar to immediately halt this grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

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The premise that the full grant went directly to the Wuhan lab was soon brought up by another conservative media outlet — Newsmax — but this time in a question to Trump at a White House coronavirus task force briefing. And it, too, suggested the grant be halted.

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“There’s also another report that the NIH, under the Obama administration, in 2015 gave that lab $3.7 million in a grant,” the Newsmax reporter said on April 17. “Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?”

The reason is because it didn’t — at least not the full amount and not directly. But this didn’t stop Trump from swiftly saying he would terminate the funding.

Trump at first didn’t seem familiar with the situation. “The Obama administration gave them a grant of $3.7 million? I’ve been hearing about that,” Trump said. Then he quickly indicated not just that he’d been hearing about it, but that there were discussions underway and he had reached a decision.

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“And we’ve instructed that if any grants are going to that area — we’re looking at it, literally, about an hour ago, and also early in the morning,” Trump said. “We will end that grant very quickly. But it was granted quite a while ago."

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Indeed, it wasn’t until shortly after the briefing that more accurate numbers began to filter out among prominent conservatives, with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) tweeting that he had just confirmed $76,000 in fiscal year 2019 went to the Wuhan lab.

BREAKING NEWS: Today @NIH confirmed to me 76,000 US taxpayer dollars in FY2019 went to one of the Chinese virology labs in Wuhan at the center of the #CoronavirusOutbreak.

Despite that, at the next day’s briefing Trump repeated the false claim that the $3.7 million had gone to the Wuhan Institute.

“We also talked about the lab in China where, I guess, $3.7 million was given some time ago,” Trump said. “And we’re looking at that very closely.”

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A week later, EcoHealth said its funding had indeed been cut — and not just the portion of the funding that involved research at the Wuhan Institute, but all of it.

And still, the misinformation thrived. While lawmakers wrote letters calling for no further funding involving the lab correctly said it was only partof the $3.7 million, the Washington Times falsely reported on April 22 that, “The National Institutes of Health issued a $3.7 million grant to pay for coronavirus research at Wuhan in 2015, despite safety warnings from the State Department.”

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Trump ally Rudolph W. Giuliani would also claim on April 26 that the awarding of the grant came despite a prohibition on the type of research done in Wuhan. “Back in 2014, the Obama administration prohibited the U.S. from giving money to any laboratory, including in the U.S., that was fooling around with these viruses,” Giuliani said. “Prohibited! Despite that, Dr. [Anthony S.] Fauci gave $3.7 million to the Wuhan laboratory.”

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Blaming Fauci personally for the grant is one thing, but the type of research involved was not prohibited. While there was a prohibition on research involving potentially deadly biological agents, this did not apply to “naturally occurring influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses” unless the research could increase the dangers involved.

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Aaron Blakehttps://hs.ajy.co/readerajy.co | FreshRSShttps://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-shakespeare-actually-wrote-about-the-plagueWhat Shakespeare Actually Wrote About the Plague | The New Yorker2020-05-11T06:24:47.000-07:00— Permalink
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https://hs.ajy.co/shaarli/?do=rss&searchtags=ajy.coShaarlihttps://qz.com/1854932/coronavirus-cases-up-again-in-seoul-after-social-distancing-eased/Coronavirus cases just rose again in Seoul after a social-distancing letup2020-05-10T11:04:00.000-07:00Just three days after the government of South Korea started relaxing social-distancing measures, the mayor of Seoul ordered the shutdown of more than 2,100 bars and other nightclubs Saturday (May 9) due to a rash of new coronavirus cases.
More than 50 cases have been linked to a 29-year-old man who visited five clubs and bars in a popular Seoul neighborhood last weekend, reported the Wall Street Journal. He tested positive on Wednesday—the same day the government said it was fine to resume normal life.
South Korea had been reporting a declining number of new cases for weeks. The nation has been a model to other countries for dealing with the pandemic, but the new cases highlight the challenges—for any society—of returning to normalcy and reopening the economy.
One of the hardest-hit countries early on, South Korea swiftly responded to the outbreak, leveraging its hard-won experience with the deadly MERS outbreak five years ago. By mid-February, the government rolled out mass testing along with an aggressive contact-tracing program. Unlike other nations that have suffered more, including Italy and the US, South Korea has been able to rein in the outbreak without resorting to lockdowns. With 256 deaths so far and 10,874 cases, its mortality rate is 2.4%, whereas the world’s fatality rate overall is 6.86%.
On Saturday, Seoul mayor Park Won-soon issued an order banning large crowds at clubs, bars, and other entertainment venues, lasting at least a month, the Journal reported. He said violators will be subjected to “severe punishment,” including fines. The club outbreak may also push back the reopening of in-person instruction in schools, which was slated to begin next week, the Associated Press reported.
In a speech Sunday (May 10), South Korean president Moon Jae-in said that the cases shows how “even during the stabilization phase, similar situations can arise again anytime, anywhere in an enclosed, crowded space.”
While Moon told people not to lower their “guard regarding epidemic prevention,” he said “there’s no reason to stand still out of fear” and that South Korea has “the right quarantine and medical systems combined with experience to respond quickly to any unexpected infection clusters that might occur.”
Germany, another country admired for its Covid-19 response, also reported rising coronavirus cases this weekend, just days after it, too, loosened social-distancing restrictions.

Just three days after the government of South Korea started relaxing social-distancing measures, the mayor of Seoul ordered the shutdown of more than 2,100 bars and other nightclubs Saturday (May 9) due to a rash of new coronavirus cases.

More than 50 cases have been linked to a 29-year-old man who visited five clubs and bars in a popular Seoul neighborhood last weekend, reported the Wall Street Journal. He tested positive on Wednesday—the same day the government said it was fine to resume normal life.

South Korea had been reporting a declining number of new cases for weeks. The nation has been a model to other countries for dealing with the pandemic, but the new cases highlight the challenges—for any society—of returning to normalcy and reopening the economy.

One of the hardest-hit countries early on, South Korea swiftly responded to the outbreak, leveraging its hard-won experience with the deadly MERS outbreak five years ago. By mid-February, the government rolled out mass testing along with an aggressive contact-tracing program. Unlike other nations that have suffered more, including Italy and the US, South Korea has been able to rein in the outbreak without resorting to lockdowns. With 256 deaths so far and 10,874 cases, its mortality rate is 2.4%, whereas the world’s fatality rate overall is 6.86%.

On Saturday, Seoul mayor Park Won-soon issued an order banning large crowds at clubs, bars, and other entertainment venues, lasting at least a month, the Journal reported. He said violators will be subjected to “severe punishment,” including fines. The club outbreak may also push back the reopening of in-person instruction in schools, which was slated to begin next week, the Associated Press reported.

In a speech Sunday (May 10), South Korean president Moon Jae-in said that the cases shows how “even during the stabilization phase, similar situations can arise again anytime, anywhere in an enclosed, crowded space.”

While Moon told people not to lower their “guard regarding epidemic prevention,” he said “there’s no reason to stand still out of fear” and that South Korea has “the right quarantine and medical systems combined with experience to respond quickly to any unexpected infection clusters that might occur.”

Germany, another country admired for its Covid-19 response, also reported rising coronavirus cases this weekend, just days after it, too, loosened social-distancing restrictions.